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COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 



THE BLESSED LIFE 



The Blessed Life 



BEING A SERIES OF MEDITA- 
TIONS ON MANHOOD AND 
WOMANHOOD IN CHRIST 



/ 

BY 
WILLIAM A. QUAYLE 



« O O 5 ' 



*^ When I becaine a matiy I put away 

childish things * * 
^^ I knew a man in Christ^ ^ 



CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS 



THE LIBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
Two Copies Received 

JUN. 10 1901 

Copyright entry 

CLASS Cv^XXe. N». 

COPY 0. 



^ 






COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY 
THE WESTERN METH- 
ODIST BOOK CONCERN 



CONTENTS 

Page 

I. Christianity's Point of Power, ... 9 

II. Christianity's Theory, - - - - 21 

III. Christianity's Increment of Power, - - 35 

IV. The Religio-Social Instinct of Christianity, 49 
V. Christianity and Law, 83 

VI. Christianity as Day Laborer, - - - 103 

VII. The Sanity of Christianity, - - - - 1x9 

VIII. Christianity and Thought Life, - - - 133 

IX. The Aristocracy of Christianity, - - - 153 

X. The Social Joy OF Christianity, - - - 167 

XI. The Centrality of God, 181 

XII. Christianity's World-Tie, - - - - 217 

XIII. The Blessed Life, ..--.- 239 

XIV. The Immortal Society, .... 265 



ONE WORD 
To the Reader of "The Blessed Life'' 

In writing these chapters on ^^ The Blessed Life^^ 
my object has been to help Christians , specially young 
Christians^ to lift up their eyes and behold both the 
terrestrial and celestial aspects of a holy life, and to 
enforce the solidarity of Christian experience j so as 
to make the heart beat high in sane exultancy at 
what we are and are to be, ^^ whose life is hid 
with Christ in God, * ' 

WILLIAM A, QUAYLE 



THE PRAYER 

Blessed Christ, because Thou lovest us, our lives grow 
glad; and we sing because we must. We would not be lag- 
gard in our praise nor love, nor promises nor supplyings of 
loyalty to God our Savior, We honestly want to love Thee, 
for this is our logical service. May we not be belated in any 
good design, nor shamed from any moral or religious task. 
Keep Thou us from the high crhne and misdemeanor of 
religious inertness. Make us to be fervent in spirit, because 
there burns hot within us the love of Christ that passeth 



To this end of making our lives more courageous, in- 
vigorating, ingratiating, thoughtful, beautiful, and useful, 
bless these words written on ^^The Blessed Life.'*'* He who 
wrote them. Thou knowest, loves Thee and would humbly 
pray for grace to love Thee more, and would be a hand to 
beckon and to lead others into like precious faith, until the 
day break and the shadows flee away. 

Bless this book, therefore, blessed, blessed Master, Send 
it out to be big with ministry of love and inspiration for the 
glory of God the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, in 
the name of Christ, Amen, 



CHAPTER I 
Christianity's Point of Power 

" Who loved me and game Himself for me " 



SOUL 

The soul is not like harp of gold, 

That waits the touch of dreamer' s hands 

To wake its music sweet and old, 

As memories brought from distant lands. 

The soul is like a warrior brave, 

Who sights the foe, and fears him not ; 

Who laughs at death, and scorns the grave, 
And shouts, "I have with heroes fought." 



GOD'S number is one. The science of num- 
bers is one among many common things, 
so apparently simple, so actually complex and 
mysterious as to lose him who attempts the per- 
plexing subject. All of us studied arithmetic. 
We learned that numbers ran from one to duo- 
devigintillions and beyond; that they were add- 
ible, subtractible, multiplicable, divisible; that by 
them stars' masses and movements are comput- 
able, and — what else did we learn? Did we know 
why? Could we discover, and do we know, how 
nine digits and a naught climb into myriads? 
There lies the philosophy of numbers; and who 
affects to have mastered it? or, if he so affect, 
has he? Numbers are mysterious as cohesion 
and alphabets. We think we can figure; but 
can we figure in the gigantic way? No; we are 
children cipherers yet. We can enumerate and 
add, but know how to do little, very, very little 
more. The case stands thus : We can see a fact, 
but can elaborate no theory. We do know that 



12 The Blessed Life 

one IS the miracle among the numerals. One is 
the fertile number, sowing mathematics down 
with intricate combinations. This is strange and 
very true. Leave the theory; pass to the fact. 
With this we must deal; with the other we can 
not deal. Our faculties fall short for such pro- 
digious effort. 

Now, this unit idea belongs to God, and is 
revolutionary in society. The mass bewilders 
men. Magnitude is their ideal. It they wor- 
ship, and to it build shrines. From the huge 
men pass to the little. A kingdom — they mag- 
nify that. A state is their dream and goal. 
Those large things they think worthy. They 
pass by man to men. God does the reverse. He 
passes from men to man, from state to individual, 
and rises again from man to states. Risk God. 
He knows. He knows the philosophy of num- 
bers, seeing he invented numbers and their prop- 
erties and their applications. Men must swing 
back to God's method and initiative. Chris- 
tianity deals with the integer. God does not 
save men, but saves a man. Christ is the great 
Specialist, and he is leaving a multitude to ar- 
rive at a man. This method is revolutionary, 



Christianity's Point of Power i 3 

upsetting men's doings old as history as Christ 
overturns the tables of the money-changers in 
the temple's courts. Strange that men did not 
know how to initiate reform. Strange they do 
not know the first syllable of a constructive pro- 
cess. Strange, but true. Men said, a race; 
Christ said, a man. 

Here is Christianity's point of power, the 
individual He is basilar. Out of individuals 
you can build church, society, governments, as 
out of stones you can build cathedrals, bridges, 
cities. Christ begins at the basis of society. 
This looks like statesmanship, and is what it 
looks like. A consideration of this generic 
method will prove profitable. Through the gos- 
pel we have become so familiarized with this 
process as to feel no wonder on looking at it, 
though the wonder is still there. Christianity, 
taught of Christ, has a gospel for a man; not 
for society as such. Nothing in Christ's method 
amazes and stimulates me more, nor more 
moves me to supreme passion for the gospel's 
Christ. Christ — in his birth, growth, tempta- 
tion, struggle, mastery, miracles of goodness 
and teaching, Gethsemane, Golgotha, grave. 



14 The Blessed Life 

resurrection, ascension, session — Christ did as 
he did and all he did for the salvation of a single 
man. All of this, not less by one poor scruple, 
was essential to get one sinner out of sin into 
holiness and God. How prodigious the efifort 
required for one man's redemption ! How that 
thought burns on the soul ! Put it thus : All this 
passion of the Savior that I might have life and 
have it more abundantly. Thus does the love 
of Christ lift into its regal proportions and amaz- 
ing loveliness. Paul glories in this thought, and 
puts it reverently, as if it were a prayer, say- 
ing, "Who loved me and gave himself for me'' 
This is the unspeakable grace of God that he 
deals with me as if he and I were equals : "Gave 
himself for me." We miss the magnitude of 
God's love for the individual by the world idea. 
We scatter it and the personal persuasion and 
obligation; though, to be sure, we gain in the 
world conception, yet in so gaining we lose 
in individual conception. "Jesus Christ, by the 
grace of God, tasted death for every man" — a 
wide, celestial notion unquestionably, but one 
which, in its ampleness, in effect lessens our sense 



Christianity's Point of Power 15 

of personal debt. ''Who loved me/' is the ap- 
pealing putting of redemption. All was essen- 
tial to my personal salvation. 

God called Samuel by name, saying, ''Sam- 
uel, Samuel !" — a scene he is perpetually repeat- 
ing, if we understand his method. Christ was 
heard of a proud and persecuting Pharisee call- 
ing, ''Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?'' 
Jesus saw Levi sitting at the receipt of custom, 
and said, "Follow me." Thus did he get all of 
his disciples. So did he heal. He dealt not 
with congregations, but with units. If he 
healed them all, he did it by a personal faith 
of each and by a personal attention on the part 
of Christ to each. Jesus' disciples marveled 
that he talked with the Syrian woman at the 
well; but if they had been wise, their wonder 
would have been had he not talked to her. His 
appeal was not to Samaria, but to a Samaritan. 
In this individualizing process of Christ is some- 
thing unspeakably precious. We are not lost 
in this throng. He knows who touches him, as 
the woman creeping nigh him, thinking by 
stealth to get her healing, found herself healed 



1 6 The Blessed Life 

and detected. She could not be hid when he 
looked for her; so we find ourselves, in the plan 
of redemption, found out of God. 

One of Jesus' sayings which I wear on my 
breast as if it were a star of some royal order is, 
''He calleth his own sheep by name." Is any- 
thing more tender, or so tender? God calleth 
the stars by their names; but he named them. 
But our names are given by others than God. 
Yet so he calls us by name. I will thank him 
for that mercy while I live. I recall an old 
German, whose tongue had not learned the mas- 
tery of our American speech, but whose heart 
and head had learned the blessed language of 
the kingdom of God; and he, at a love-feast, 
rising in his place, said, brokenly, but with a 
sweet tenderness, which had been gracious even 
in a woman: ''He calls me by my name; for he 
calleth his own sheep by name. And I love 
him — and he loves me — and I know him — and 
he knows me — and he will say, now and some 
day- — some good, good day [when he choked 
a little for holy laughter, mixed with tears] 
some day he will call me by my name in heaven, 
saying, 'Jacob, Jacob.' " How sweet and ac- 



Christianity's Point of Power 17 

curate and profound withal was the old Ger- 
man's theology; for so Jesus ''calleth his own 
sheep by name, and leadeth them out/' 

Here, too, belongs the emphasis the gospel 
places on responsibility. ''Let every one bear 
his own burden;" ''J^dge not, lest ye be judged;" 
in other words, Stand for yourself. ''Take heed 
to thyself and thy doctrine." "Hold fast that 
thou hast." "I" is the personal pronoun of the 
Book of God. We can not divide responsibility; 
no shifting of burdens. Peter met his post-resur- 
rection rebuke because he forgot this. "What 
shall this man do?" is his eager, half-fraternal, 
half-curious inquiry, to receive this positively 
frigid reply from Jesus: "What is that to thee? 
Follow thou me." Not to conceive the indi- 
viduality element in Christianity is to blot 
Christianity out. This horizon rests on our 
shoulders; the cause of God is our personal bur- 
den. It is so with cross and blessing. "Take 
up thy cross and follow me," is the penetrative 
Christ-appeal to the solitary soul. What does 
Christianity propose to do for and in this indi- 
vidual, of which the gospel makes so much and 
whom the gospel raises to such amazing heights? 



1 8 The Blessed Life 

The answer near at hand and usual is, Christian- 
ity means to make the individual a Christian; 
this of course, and necessarily. This reply seems 
to me an egregious blunder. Than this, as I 
see it, nothing is more foreign to God's plan. 
The definition given would make Christianity 
ultimate, would transfer it into a goal. This 
misapprehension of the function of Christianity 
is hoary. The centuries have been saying this 
in reiteration. We have talked much of saints, 
assuming the gospel proposed to produce saints. 
This misapprehension is of a piece with the 
other. Christ proposed, as an objective, neither 
to create Christians nor saints. If he had, then 
might the world flout Christianity as a visionary 
and a skyey influence, indiscreet and irrelevant. 
Now, what Christianity means to do is to recre- 
ate men. Christianity in such a view becomes 
not an end, but a means. Christianity is God's 
method of making men. This is Christ's goal in 
the soul. What God created when the world 
was new was a man in his own image. What 
God wishes to recreate in us by the new birth, 
''not of flesh, nor of blood, nor of man, but of 
God/' is a new man. God purposes peopling 



Christianity's Point of Power 19 

a redeemed world with a redeemed manhood 
and womanhood, and in time to transplant these 
into the heavenly citizenship. With this under- 
standing of the purposes of the gospel, Paul 
declares: ''Till we all come in the unity of the 
faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God 
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the 
stature of the fullness of Christ." 

Christianity's point of power is the individual, 
with clear intent to restore him to humanity and 
God, so that he may serve God and man in new- 
ness of spirit. Therefore Christianity touches 
the individual, and clings to him as if he were 
its soul's unutterable love. 



A PRAYER 

MY Lord and my Gody Thou dost know ME and love ME ! 
The story is pasty far past belief, unless Thyself hadst told it. 
fesus came from heaven to bear the message, intrusting it to none, 
because had any other brought it we had felt sure the message was 
changed, deranged, mistaken ; but Jesus came from far, with dyed 
garments from Bozrah, and message and Messenger said, God 
loveth thee, Jesus stopped on the world"* s street to speak to ME, 
and I became as one transfigured. My cares, my pleasures, my 
toils, my tears, my achievements, my aspirings, my fears, my losses, 
my gains ; m^y prayers, mtiltitudinous as clouds; my praises, often 
belated like a weary traveler, — all are of consequence to Him, 
They are as if they were not mine, but His. How can this thing 
be ? And yet, thanks be unto God for his unspeakable gift. He 
knows me as my mother would. No more, my soul, say no word 
more. Kneel and look God"* s way, and let thy heart"* s silence sing 
psalms to him, and thy lipSy though unopened, shout hallelujahs. 
Amen, 



CHAPTER II 
Christianity's Theory 

"Of vahom the ivhote f amity in henven And earth is named' 



MY HOME 

*'I go to prepare a. place for you " 

He told it me, the blessed Christ of God, 

The while Love's Paschal sobbed itself away 

And earth's dark night did melt into the gray 

Of that illustrious morning. I can plod 

Life's way in hopelessness no more. The rod 

Heaven holds will lead me weary to the day 

Whose light pales not to evening, where we stray 

Like children spent with joy. Not now a clod. 

But prince and son for whom this dwelling rare 

Was fashioned. Winds like laughter stray. The streams 

Are golden with delight. The shades are peace 

And bloom with mercy. High God' s hills and fair. 

My home ! The beauty of a poet's dream 

Pales and must pale before this sweet surcease. 



HOME," as known to moderns, is as plainly 
an invention of God as the sunlight is. 
Jewry and Christianity must, in history, be cred- 
ited with the only home-life worthy the name. 
Whatever the vicissitudes of the Divine idea of 
family, that idea has made its way across the 
centuries. Believers in God know the family is 
a Divine institution; for the Scriptures tell how, 
when the world-house was completed and de- 
clared by its Designer to be "very good," then 
he put the housekeepers in; and these were one 
man and one woman, whose blood and love and 
interests were one. Polygamy and the conse- 
quent subordination of woman crept into and 
poisoned society, becoming at once the marks 
and the makers of its debauchery; and this law- 
lessness of polygamy was one of the things God 
"in the time of men's ignorance winked at." 
But when the Mosaic system had worked its 
meaning, though we have no memorabilia of the 

change, polygamy was banished as effectually 

23 



214 The Blessed Life 

as idolatry, so that in the days of Jesus monog- 
amy was universally prevalent among the sons 
of Abraham. In other words, the family idea 
had worked its way back to a normal and orig- 
inal state. But whether a man believes in God 
or not, or accepts or rejects the Scriptures as in- 
spired truth, one thing every student of ethnol- 
ogy and anthropology must and does allow; 
namely, that at the first glimpse of history, as 
of man, the family existed. However crude or 
perverted, the family idea was present and dom- 
inant. 

The love of one man for one woman, and one 
woman for one man, is indigenous to the soul 
and ineradicable. The history of polygamy is 
the strongest argument for monogamy. God 
joined one man and one woman together. He 
did this, not as an external fact, but as a dispo- 
sition of the soul. Sex is a stable and omnipo- 
tent fact in human affairs. Since man is man 
and woman is woman, therefore they belong each 
to the other, and must. And they belong one 
to one; therefore ''these twain shall be one 
flesh," is the solemn affirmation of all drama 



Christianity's Theory 25 

and all history. The family, in its rational lorm, 
is husband, wife, child, and forms the only pos- 
sible basis of civilization. Jacob's polygamy 
illustrates the inhuman element of such a state. 
He loved Rachel and slighted Leah, which led 
to heartache and recrimination between these 
sisters; the reason being, polygamy is a sin 
against nature. Polygamy is spurious. Nature 
abhors it, and history condemns it. Jacob's 
love for Rachel is as beautiful as any poem; but 
polygamy rent his home and stole away its se- 
renity and delight, and perpetuated the quarrel 
between the women by naturally and necessarily 
communicating itself to their children. Jacob's 
unwise favor for Joseph grew out of his pas- 
sionate love for Rachel; and so the ten sons 
leagued against the one. 

The family idea is the progressive form of 
individuality. The unit is central as the first 
discoverable truth in Christianity. The unit 
tends to association and refuses solitude; this 
dictum being, "It is not good for man to live 
alone," as was God's verdict. It is God's ver- 
dict, and it is man's. Enoch Arden, we are 



26 The Blessed Life 

told by his poet biographer, in exile from his 
wife and babe, 

** Dwelt in eternal summer ill content.'^ 

This is the human hunger and the heart instinct. 
So the first disposition of the individual is to 
seek association. Sex instinct conjoined to the 
social instinct tends to produce the family; and 
society is patterned after the family, the family 
constituting what is, to most of us, the dearest 
place on earth — home — about which cluster the 
loveHest and most endearing memories of life. 

Family and home are the central thoughts in 
Christianity. The Church of God is a family — 
part here, part there, but a family still; one in 
a winter, the other in the summer land, but a 
family and one family — and bearing the name 
of Christ, as says the Scripture, ''Of whom the 
whole family in heaven and earth is named." We 
know the family to have a father, mother, sis- 
ter, brother. This Christianity has. The 
Church is our home. God is our Father. Christ 
is our Elder Brother. We ourselves are breth- 
ren. Nothing can be more assured than that 
Christianity is a family in all its endearing moods 



Christianity's Theory 27 

and tenses. Jesus taught us to say, *'Our Fa- 
ther which art in heaven;" therefore Christianity 
believes in the Fatherhood of God, a doctrine 
now commonplace to triteness, but, when enun- 
ciated by our Savior, new, radical, unbelievable. 
This utterance destroyed classes at a word. Class 
distinction can not live in such an atmosphere. 
Children are equal in family rights. God as a 
Father is love. As John says, ''God is love,'' 
and in himself combines paternity and maternity. 
The heart must have mother-love. We dare 
not omit it. All hearts are hungry for that. For 
this reason Mariolatry in Roman Catholicism 
has had such an appeal to life. We can readily 
perceive the reason of its vogue. But in God 
is motherhood as certainly as fatherhood. Fa- 
therhood is strength, motherhood is tenderness; 
but God IS both, seeing he "taketh up the isles 
as a very little thing," and "the Lord pitieth his 
children." Shorthouse, in "John Inglesant," 
says this tender and truthful word, "Only the 
infinite pity is equal to the infinite pathos of 
human life;" and pity is a maternal quality 
abundant in God, for does not the Scripture 
say, "When thy father and mother forsake thee, 



28 The Blessed Life 

then the Lord will take thee up?'' Then we 
see how full Jesus was of this feminine quality. 
He, seeing the lonely widow following alone the 
bier of her only son, ''had compassion on her," 
even as he saw the multitude and had compas- 
sion on them, because he saw that they were "as 
sheep having no shepherd." God is ''strong to 
deliver." He is "a Sun and Shield" and "a very 
present help in trouble." Help and hearing are 
his. "O thou that hearest prayer, to thee shall 
all flesh come." 

Besides, the gospel is called by Jesus a mar- 
riage; for Christ told how a king made a mar- 
riage for his son; and in the explanation of the 
parable we affirm that the parties of the mar- 
riage are Christ and man and signify the incar- 
nation wherein God wedded himself to man's 
flesh, experience, and life in indissoluble wed- 
lock, seeing Christ shall through all eternity be 
"the God-Man, Christ Jesus." Christ is our 
Elder Brother; and John knows, "Now are we 
the sons of God," and in consonance with this 
relation find the apostles' speech. Paul calls 
Philemon the master, and Onesimus the slave, 
both brethren, naming Philemon "brother" and 



Christianity's Theory 29 

Onesimus ''the brother beloved;'' and writes, ''I 
commend to you Phoebe our sister;" and the 
Church is addressed as ''holy brethren;'' and 
Peter calls Paul by the endearing name of "bro- 
ther/' saying, "As our beloved brother Paul 
hath written." And holding fast to the family 
idea, with its subsequent fraternal injunction, is, 
"Greet one another with a holy kiss," meaning, 
clearly, Treat each other as members of one 
household. And the apocalyptic angel, when 
John would have worshiped him, forbade, say- 
ing, "I am of thy brethren." We are told we 
are "of the household of faith," and the love- 
feast (agape) in the Church is sign of a home, 
where sister and brother, in their Father's home, 
break bread together. And Jesus carries the 
idea far into the eternal life, saying: "Let not 
your heart be troubled. Ye believe in God, be- 
lieve also in me. I go to prepare a place for 
you, that where I am there ye may be also. In 
my Father's house are many mansions." And 
this IS "Our Father which art in heaven;" and 
who does not know where Father is, is home? 
Heaven is our home. 

Christianity is a brotherhood because Chris- 



30 The Blessed Life 

tianity is a family. This thought is prevalent in 
all the gospel. Christians are enjoined not to 
go to law with each other because they are 
brethren. St. James is fierce in his denunciation 
of a Christian who makes a difference between 
a brother of high and a brother of low degree. 
Hear him say: ''For if there come into your 
assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly ap- 
parel, and there come in also a poor man in vile 
raiment; and ye have respect to him that wear- 
eth the gay clothing, and say unto him, Sit thou 
here in a good place; and say to the poor. Stand 
thou there, or sit here under my footstool; are 
ye not then partial in yourselves, and are become 
judges of evil thoughts?" ''But if ye have re- 
spect to persons, ye commit sin/' All this plainly 
because, as between brothers in one household, 
there can be no distinctions, and James will 
rightly inquire, "How dwelleth the love of God 
in him" who does after this fashion? In other 
words, seeing God is the Father, and seeing rich 
and poor are brethren, how dare we show petty 
preferences? The slave and the master are 
brethren, as Paul shows Philemon. 

The apostolic hortatory of masters as to the 



Christianity's Theory 31 

treatment due their servants is based on the self- 
evident family tie existing between slave and 
master as both being sons of God and, therefore, 
brothers to each other. 

Yet in the family relation each member re- 
tains his individuality in character and service. 
So in the family of Christ we name the Church, 
all have not the same office. Individuality is 
not infringed upon. The integer retains its 
magnitude and authority and obligation. The 
unit is not swallowed up in the Church, but 
rather given wider field for play of all his powers 
in their redeemed and amazing vigor. Chris- 
tianity fosters individuality in and because of a 
family idea, and not in spite of it. Paul says: 
"And he gave some, apostles; and some, proph- 
ets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors 
and teachers, for the perfecting of the saints, 
for the work of the ministry, for the edifying 
of the body of Christ: till we all come in the 
unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the 
Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the meas- 
ure of the stature of the fullness of Christ." 
Here, then, is evident severalty in ofifice and oc- 
cupation. IvCt each member of this household 



32 The Blessed Life 

of faith find his bent and follow it so that no 
waste of power may ensue. 

Now, the Church is the visible home of this 
family in Christ; therefore to be loved, lauded, 
and held to with holy tenacity. They who at- 
tack the Church and minify its work and office 
have not gotten at God's meaning. Home must 
not be berated. So the Church must not be 
berated nor belittled. Jesus called the Jewish 
temple. ''my Father's house," which gives the 
meaning of the Church of God. ''My house 
shall be called the house of prayer;" namely, a 
place where sons and daughters shall converse 
with their Father, even God, and hold commun- 
ion one with another. Therefore is the house 
of God holy. 

A home here and a home yonder. Such is 
the teaching of the gospel of Christ, and we can 
not deny that it is sweet, helpful, and inspiring. 
Trust the poet to reveal the heart-thought of 
this dear word : 

**When daily tasks are done, and tired hands 
Lie still and folded on the resting knee, 
When loving thoughts have leave to loose their bands, 
And wander over past and future free ; 



Christianity's Theory 33 

When visions bright of love and hope fulfilled 

Bring weary eyes a spark of olden fire ; 
One castle fairer than the rest we build, 

One blessing more than others we desire ; 
A home, our home, wherein all waiting past, 

We two may stand together, and alone; 
Our patient taskwork finished, and at last 

Love's perfect blessedness and peace our own. 
Some little nest of safety and delight. 
Guarded by God's good angels day and night. 

We can not guess if this dear home shall lie 

In some green spot embowered with arching trees. 
Where bird-notes joined with brook-notes gliding by. 

Shall waken music while we sit at ease. 
Or if amid the city's busy din 

Is built the nest for which we look and long. 
No sound without shall mar the peace within, 

The calm of love that time has proved so strong ; 
Or if — ah ! solemn thought! — this house of ours 

Doth lie beyond the world's confusing noise, 
And if the nest be built in Eden's bowers. 

What do we still but silently rejoice? 
We have a home, but of its happy state 
We know not yet. We are content to wait." 

For the home thought in Christianity, ''Bless 

the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, 

bless his holy name!" 
3 



A PRAYER 

O our Gody be our souV s sky^ into which tall pirU'trees grow 
and where Jly the soaring and the singing birds; where clouds 
float with water for the thirsty ground; where the stars cluster and 
the shadows fall for sleep ; where walk the ruddy dawns y and 
where the sunsets glow^ — be our sky. 

Be our sky, whose dawns beckon and whose spaces are invita- 
tions ^ and whose silences make for prayer, and where Thou makest 
the goings forth of the morning to sing. 

Be our sky of hope, of morning, when it is black night — star- 
less, void ; be room, for our growth and sun for making our broad 
daylight, so that though we run, we shall not stumble, and so that 
at eventide it shall be light. Amen. 



-CHAPTER III 



Christianity's Increment of Power 



'Our citizenship is in heaven " 



A PRAYER 

Trumpet Thy call at morn, my slumbers break, 
My dreams dispel, and bid my opening eyes to see 
What lieth near my hands for doing. Free 
Me from my lethargy and blindness; wake 
My conscience that it sleep no more nor shake 
A craven when the danger shocks. Decree 
Some service arduous and harsh ; and me 
Enstrengthen that my task I undertake. 
And then through all the weary, vexing day 
Give Thou me patience that with simple trust 
I hold to God, my Consolator and 
Reward, and learn to labor while I pray. 
And make of life a psalm as goodness must ; 
And thus my day to leave in God's good hand. 



THE God of arithmetic is the God of grace. 
Figures congregate. They add and multiply. 
They are gregarious like migratory birds. So 
the human integer. To be alone is opportu- 
nity; to remain alone is death. *'No man liveth 
to himself is the formula capable of being in- 
terpreted, No man can live alone. The family 
is the state in which man is born, and looks back 
to the individual and forward to society. So 
man, the unit, is meant for men, the multiple. 
His explanation is, he is for society. The hermit 
sins against the main movement of his being. 
He means well and does ill. Man is, so to say, 
a pilgrim; and his destination is society. He 
may die on the way; he may grow weary of the 
pilgrimage and cease his journey; he may be- 
come pessimist and live anchorite, like Timon 
of Athens; or he may fight society like an in- 
sane soldier who wars against his own com- 
rades — yet none of these miscarriages invalidate 

the statement of his destiny. He was meant for 

37 



38 The Blessed Life 

society as trees are meant for the woodland. 
Society never eliminates the integer, but con- 
tains him. A man, virile, creative, energized 
of God, is as much himself and as distinct in 
the midst of ten thousands as if he lived in 
some forest, solitary as Thoreau. The attrition 
of society may wear away the individuality of 
the human weakling, but ought not, and, with 
a spirit of reasonable integrity to his own birth- 
right, will not. Just as islands in an archipelago, 
bufifeted by angry waters of an insolent ocean, 
each retains a profile like no other, but all its 
own. Oceans were not able to tame the island's 
personality. We belong to the world — in it, 
not out of it. Sir Percivale was wrong, and 
King Arthur was right. For good men to be- 
come bewitched and retire from social life, 
whether ecclesiastical, political, or purely social, 
is to play truant; aye, and coward. To stay 
where one is needed is the essence of soldier- 
ship. To flee when danger shocks is to be a 
poltroon. King Arthur staid, did duty, met 
defeat, died, but played the man, served his 
generation, and his deed was his reward. We 
are not, in Christianity, to look frigidly on 



Christianity's Increment of Power 39 

movements for human betterment or deteriora- 
tion. The cause is ours. We are sentinels walk- 
ing this beat, and are responsible for what hap- 
pens. This social instinct is in us as cohesion 
is in atoms; and in life or death we can not be 
rid of it. 

Now, if one were asked to name the special 
human marvel of Jesus' plans as they shine out 
in the gospel, I think it would be this: His use 
of man as he is, to lift him to what he is to be. 
Deranged man is like some jangled instrument 
of music, having in him the principles and all 
the principles of recovery to excellency and vir- 
tue, these being not destroyed, but damaged. 
Christ uses man's normal faculties in recovering 
him to God. You find that Christ never made 
appeal to any faculty man was not accustomed 
to use in his daily life — such as faith, self-sacri- 
fice, devotion, love. This gospel invented no 
quality of soul, but redeemed all of them — gave 
them a new birth, not physically, but spiritually, 
and then directed them, or, as we may say, 
headed them toward God. This thought applies 
to man's social instincts. Man had sure social 
propensions, and these Christ sublimated and 



40 The Blessed Life 

makes holy, calls to sainthood, by which is meant 
saintly manhood and womanhood. Man, as 
Christian, is not less a man or woman, but rather 
more. He is not more ascetic, but rather less. 
He does not lose interest in time and earth and 
folks, but gains immensely in his interest in all 
of them. Each Christian is redeemed for so- 
ciety in earth and society in heaven. 

And here our thought coalesces progressively 
with an observation made regarding man, the 
unit. Christianity was then affirmed to be, not 
an end, but a means. From this premise follows 
this observation : The Church is not an end, but 
an intermediary. Canon Freemantle has, I 
think, clearly shown that the Church is not final, 
and that the real finality of the gospel is to pro- 
duce and renovate society through elevating 
manhood and womanhood. In such a view, the 
Church, on becoming universal, would disap- 
pear, its universality being its vanishing-point. 
This is what the Roman pontiffs had in mind, 
doubtless. They saw that the province of the 
gospel was to conquer society, take the world 
under the ideal sovereignty of Jesus. The 
Church would become universal. Spiritual 



Christianity's Increment of Power 41 

things are important above temporal things, as 
all the voices of the Scripture attest. God is 
above Governments; and how easily and how 
naturally grew the misconception of the tem- 
poral sovereignty of the Church! Those early 
Christian statesmen were not far wrong; nay, 
they were all but wholly right. The Church 
is God's kingdom set up among men, and is 
meant for extension and, as Christians know, 
for universality and, therefore, for ascendency 
over all else — but not as the Roman pontiffs sup- 
posed. Their error was the supposing that so- 
ciety redeemed was to form a Church, whereas 
in fact society, as redeemed, would inevitably 
eliminate the Church. The Church is instru- 
mental, and, if its services could be wholly per- 
formed, would pass away like the ceremonial 
law. Ecclesiasticism finds it hard to see its own 
limitations and adjust itself to them. The 
Church is not the end. God wants '^a peculiar 
people;" and the Church is his method of achiev- 
ing this result. Of course, society in its entirety 
never will affiliate with Christ, therefore will 
the Church never be swallowed up in its desire; 
namely, a renovated and purified society. None 



42 The Blessed Life 

the less, however, is the need among us to see 
how society, and not the Church, is climax of 
all holy effort. 

"Neglect not the assembling of yourselves 
together," is the injunction. Keep the social 
instinct alive, is the meaning. Talk to each 
other about God, so shall ye become more neigh- 
borly with God and with each other. Devote 
yourselves to society, both for your own sake 
and for others' sake, is the spirit of the Chris- 
tian command as received from "One who is 
our Master, even Christ." 

To expand this idea: The Christian is to 
make the very most of himself for everything 
tending to social weal. He is a Christian to the 
end that the world may be recovered to God 
and to itself. How exalted is the Christian's 
business and vocation! This is, in truth, a 
"heavenly calling," and we are in "heavenly 
places in Christ Jesus." 

We have not caught the wider application 
of our vocation. We are, in fact, licensed 
recoverers of society, and are capable for the 
work since Christ is our help, and we "can 
do all things through Christ that strength- 



Christianity's Increment of Power 43 

eneth us/' We are not to moan, but to live. 
Mrs. Browning has this noble sonnet pressing 
this truth home : 

**Methinks we do as fretful children do. 
Leaning their faces on the window-pane 
To sigh the glass dim with their own breath's stain, 
And shut the sky and landscape from their view; 
And thus, alas ! since God the Maker drew 
A mystic separation 'twixt those twain. 
The life beyond us, and our souls in pain. 
We miss the prospect which we're called unto 
By grief we're fools to use. Be still and strong, 
O man, my brother ! hold thy sobbing breath. 
And keep thy soul's large window pure from wrong. 
That so, as life's appointment issueth. 
Thy vision may be clear to watch along 
The sunset consummation-lights of death." 

The Christian is at the storm center. He is 
as a man who sits in the general's councils and 
helps to plan campaigns and sieges and set up 
governments and collect revenue and levy taxes. 
He must be intense in interest, therefore. He 
is interested, not simply in his Church, or in his 
city, or in his commonw^ealth, or in his own 
country, but is interested in the islands of the 
sea and the farthest Thule. Society is his con- 
cern. He is interested, not in the Anglo-Saxon, 



44 The Blessed Life 

nor the Teuton, nor the Slav, nor the Gael, nor 
the Ethiopian, nor the Malay, but is interested 
in all of them. There are no geographical nor 
ethnographical boundaries in his estimation of 
peoples. All are ''bought with a price, even the 
precious blood of Christ." Man is his specialty. 
He is interested in the illiterate as in the learned, 
in the slums as well as in the rich — interested in 
them all. He leaves nothing out of his reckon- 
ing. All are God's, and all are his neighbors 
and friends. He will not ask where men were 
born, nor how they were reared, but will be eager 
to know whether they are born of God, to the 
end that their ''citizenship may be in heaven," 
which is the only credential to genuine citizen- 
ship on earth. Or, if they be not born of God, 
his sleepless effort is to the end that they may 
"walk in the light as God is in the light," and 
so may have "fellowship one with another and 
the blood of Jesus Christ, God's Son, may 
cleanse them from all sin." The Christian man 
is seen, then, to be interested in education, civili- 
zation, sociology, politics, in the Church and the 
individual. These are provinces in his bailiwick. 
He must not play the moral prude, and say, "I 



Christianity's Increment of Power 45 

am a Christian, and can not meddle with these 
matters/' but must, in self-understanding and 
with comprehension of his high destiny as a 
Christian, say, ''I am a Christian; therefore my 
interest in all of these matters, and all others 
touching the bettering of the race, is at sum- 
mer heat always." The Christian cares for the 
public schools. He wants them, not sectarian, 
but moral. If he honors his God, he must stand 
for the Bible in the common schools, since God 
must not be put out of his own heritage. He 
is a student in sociology, in theory, and in prac- 
tice. He wants Christ's methods introduced into 
society, and not sorry parodies of those meth- 
ods. He is political economist because Chris- 
tianity creates commerce, since it multiplies 
wants. Missionary enterprises do more to cre- 
ate trade than all the propagandism of states- 
men. Make man or woman a Christian, and 
he begins to need refinements as well as necessi- 
ties. He will build and adorn his house; he will 
read books; he will covet pictures and refining 
agencies. And the Christian is a political econo- 
mist because of his love for his Master. 

And of course he is politician. He must 



46 The Blessed Life 

vote; for bad men will. He must vote for God. 
He holds the ballot for the betterment of all 
mankind. Let him not be puerile and say, ''I 
have no interest in politics/' or, ''Politics are too 
dirty." The Christian is a cleaner-up as Christ, 
his Master, was before him. Christ cleared the 
temple of money-changers, symbolizing thereby 
the whole process of ridding society of corrupt 
influences and corrupt men. 

I boldly affirm that any Christian who fails 
to interest himself in politics at primaries as well 
as general elections, who does not use voice and 
influence and ballot for making a better com- 
munity — that Christian is blameworthy in 
Christ's sight; and God will say, ''You knew 
your duty, and did it not;" and he will be 
speechless. 

No, the Christian is a publicist of the highest 
order. Wesley was a more potent political force 
than Chatham; and these words are weighed. 
Chatham inspired England; Wesley saved Eng- 
land. The Wesleyan reforms stayed the leprosy 
of immorality and irreligion which was poison- 
ing the blood of Church and court and yeomen 
and yokel. Besides this, his revival did more 



Christianity's Increment of Power 47 

to seize the United States for God than any 
force or all forces, save only the Puritans; and 
this because the Methodist preacher was pio- 
neer, who sowed the outposts of civilization to 
education, patriotism, and godliness, and was 
thus instrumental in redeeming the frontier from 
barbarism to civilization. The Christian is a 
politician. Let him be sane and steady and 
broad between the eyes, and be chary about of- 
fering resolutions, but efficient in the honest 
daily discharge of daily duties for Jesus' sake 
and for the sake of men. 

The aspirant to knighthood who, after a night 
of prayer and fasting, came to be knighted, took 
oath to be pure in heart and purpose and to de- 
fend the weak and helpless and worthy. A 
Christian is God's knight-errant in the earth, 
sworn to fealty to society and to the common 
weal of all the world. 



A PRAYER 

MY God J I am not my own^ but am bought with a price; nor 
would I be my own a single moment ^ for to be Thine is blessed to 
the point of glory. Thou settest the solita7y soul in families of holy 
hopes and efforts confederated for the world'' s good. Thou dost be- 
leaguer the soul with invitations to be great y being good. No right 
man liveth to hi7?iself. That sore solitude would slay hif?i. He 
liveth to man and Gody and is God"* s friend ^ and into the confi- 
dence of God he steps as if he were an equal. Surely y O Lord, 
thou, art the lifter up of my head. Hear my magnificat also. Let 
me interrupt Thee morningy eveningy and at noon with thanks- 
givings and the broken expressions of a penitent affection. Make 
my life big with purposes that shall be Christlikcy and qualifica- 
tions that Thy Holy Spirit 7nay inspire and then approvcy and 
activities which shall be as fell of Thee as budding and leafing 
trees are full of sap. Make me consciousy moment by moj?ienty 
while life*s lamp keeps its little fla7?ie a-light — make me conscious 
that I belong to the family of Gody and bear the family likeness 
and am, intrusted with the family honor; and may /, by thy help- 
ful graccy keep that honor unspotted before the world: and my 
prayer is made in the name of my Savior y MY Savior y Jestis 
Christ, Amen, 



48 



CHAPTER IV 



The Religio-Social Instinct of 
Christianity 



"Mattue terricotis lingua.e, coelectibus una. " — 
Many tongues on earth, one tongue in heavzn 



WINGS 

If I had wings as lordly eagles wear, 
And I could circle mountain peaks and soar 
Above their spires, and in deep valleys pour 
Reiterant circling shadows while through air 
I voyaged as a boat through seas, and bear 
Me on in triumph over ocean's shore. 
So far and high my flight that ocean's roar 
Signaled me not, — could I with eagles share, 
My flight were not so high as now, my wings 
Less mighty than the wings which me upbear. 
My eye less keen than sight which now is mine: 
**I am God's son," my joyous spirit sings; 
I soar sublime above earth's dust and care, 
And wing my way to heaven with flight divine 



THE Christian is a man of ideas, because 
Christianity is the domain of reason, as well 
as love. Religion is intellectuality as well as 
emotions, a fact not insisted on as tenaciously 
as it ought to be. 

Life is no jargon, but a noble and mellifluous 
speech. Life is not discord, but subtle and de- 
licious music. Life is not chaos, but cosmos. 
Life is always harmony, if comprehended; is al- 
ways noble, if actually lived. But we must dis- 
tinguish between phases of living. Two alter- 
natives lie before every one of us: to exist or 
to live. This is no factitious distinction, but is 
real and apparent. Levels so far apart as that 
on which the swineherd dwells and that where 
the philosopher abides must be in different 
realms. One exists, the other lives. To exist 
or live must be of individual choosing. Man 
is here the arbiter of his own destiny. 

God gives existence to all. He gives life 

only to those who choose it. The ox exists, 

51 



5 2 The Blessed Life 

the poet lives. The ox knows not that Hfe is. 
Problemless existence is his heritage, his envi- 
ronment. He is shut in of fate, and can not 
live. He but exists and dies. The brute can 
not touch life's borders, can not wade out into 
the surges of life's pulsing sea. No man blames 
the brute because it is not more. Its state was 
inevitable. But man is not so shut in. He is 
born for life. He has no right to let his taper 
pale to darkness. Some men as certainly exist 
as does the ox. With high and far horizons, 
they do not choose to see them. Having eyes, 
man does not see. If constellations blaze above 
his head, what is that to him, if he does not lift 
his eyes? Though God reveal himself in a hun- 
dred ways, what profits that the man who will 
not note the glory of the Divine presence? Men 
may be as far from each other as if they were 
in different spheres, aye, in different constella- 
tions. Aldebaran and Orion are not farther re- 
moved each from each than is man from man. 
One dwells on low, malarial levels — on spiritual 
lowlands. Another builds his home on peaks 
that smite the zenith. The lowland dweller ex- 
ists; but he who seizes the mountain summit for 



Religio-Social Instinct 53 

a place whereon to pitch his tent — he lives. Man 
was destined for the mountain summit; and ex- 
cept he contravene his own high destiny, there 
he will dwell. He was meant for that majestic 
phase of existence which God names 'life;'' and 
this heritage he will possess, except he be his 
own disinheritor. There is high meaning in 
Walter Savage Landor's verse, 

**I warmed both hands before the fire of Hfe.** 

Life is to be utilized, and in this utilization lies 
its glory. 

Man is not to go sidling through the earth as 
if he were an interloper. He belongs here; and 
his highest success consists in draining the cup 
of his existence to the dregs. Tennyson voices 
this thought when he makes Ulysses say, ''I 
will drink life to the lees !" The question should 
not be, How little may I get from life? but. How 
largely may I become its debtor? Life's fire is 
of God's kindling; and at it we are in high honor 
bound to warm hands and brain and heart. 

Each man needs to feel that every flower 
blooms for him, and every mountain towers for 
him, and every sea sweeps and thunders for 



54 The Blessed Life 

him, and every noble soul hath wrought for 
him. These are all his by right divine. He is 
not simply ''the heir of all the ages," but he is 
heir of all the universe. Not to have laid all na- 
ture under tribute for spiritual uplift is not to 
have, in a true or large sense, lived. To have 
failed here is to have robbed one's self, is to 
have beggared one's own existence. 

All nature's holy voices call us to enter into 
life. The speech of clifif and star and westward 
glory fading into night is one. All call us to 
take our larger inheritance. Preacher and poet 
and philosopher call us into life. Each new 
opportunity is a trumpet voice calling us up- 
ward; and by such opportunities are we begirt. 

Walt Whitman says, ''Man is a summons and 
a challenge." This is true of all things that 
are. Every phase of existence is a summons, a 
challenge to thought and investigation. Every 
flower summons man to stand and challenges 
him: ''How came I? Whence my beauty?" 
Every mountain challenges, "Climb to my sum- 
mit." Every sea, with its many moaning voices, 
with its billows, wine-colored and emerald and 
azure, with its laughing silver plashing at your 



Religio-Social Instinct ^^ 

feet, and its sweep of waters with their hint of 
infinitudes — every such sea is a challenge, 
'*Come, sail on my bosom; come, wrestle with 
my billows/' Let a Columbus hear the chal- 
lenge, and he will answer it; and the mighty 
ocean will have a mightier man sailing upon its 
vastness. 

God's earth is a thorn in the side of sluggish 
self. The lakelet on the summit of the hills says, 
"Paint like this;'' and the apotheosis of day on 
the western altars says, "Create glory like unto 
this;" and the majestic silence of the midnight 
says, "Create sublime silences like mine." Then 
man takes up the gauntlet which nature has 
thrown down; man answers the challenge; and 
the earth's art is the outcome. Meanwhile, 
though man knew it not, nature hath been call- 
ing him upward, upward into life. 

Art is nothing except in so far as it helps 
me to live. History and philosophy were noth- 
ing, except as they gave me a nobler outlook 
upon life. Poetry had held a broken harp within 
her hands, but that she gave me to feel there 
was beauty and nobility in living. Theology 
would be a beauteous bubble, vanishing the 



56 The Blessed Life 

while I looked, but that it had led me to the 
Hfe eternal. In the noblest lines that welled 
from her heart, George Eliot thus defines 
heaven : 

"O, may I live in pulses stirred to generosity, 
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn 
For miserable aims that end with self, 
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, 
And with their mild persistence lead men's search 
To vaster issues!" 

This, with every noble circumstance that falls 
within the circumference of being, I call, not 
heaven, but life; and to this heritage divine, God 
calls us. 

The difiference between existence and life, 
then, is a difference in room. Life is enlarge- 
ment; so that the problem confronting every 
man is: How may I enlarge my borders? How 
may I grow out of the little into the great? 
How may I attain unto enlargement? But ideas 
have expansive power. They make room for 
themselves. They are the caloric of the soul. 
Place heat in a steam-chest, and it rushes on- 
ward. It seeks enlargement. It smites the 
piston-rod, and drives it to and fro like a shuttle. 



Religio-Social Instinct 57 

The thunder of the engine, as it rushes over the 
mountain summits and the careering of the 
steamer through the rolHng azure of the At- 
lantic are only the exhibits of the efforts of heat 
to make room for itself. 

This quality of heat, which we name its ex- 
pansive power, is that which lies at the very 
heart of the leviathan of modern commerce. It 
is the reliance upon this characteristic which 
builds the steamer, the locomotive, the factory. 
Heat expands. It is as restless as the stars. 
Never was caged eagle half so eager to be free 
from the narrow house in which it found itself a 
prisoner as is heat to be free from its enthralling 
limitations. It is an Ishmaelite that asks a wil- 
derness of room. It wants freedom. It stag- 
gers to and fro like a wounded giant, and seeks 
outlet. 

Great ideas are the heat of the soul. The law 
under which they operate is that of expansion. 
They, like heat, want room. Let them once 
enter the soul, and it will never be what it once 
was. They hate narrowness. Bring a man into 
contact with great ideas, and he somehow seems 
cramped for room. To himself he seems to be 



58 The Blessed Life 

living in a prison, when he should be in a king- 
dom. He can scarcely breathe till he get into 
larger quarters. The valley with its shadows is 
insupportable. He seems half suffocated, and 
longs for the mountain height and its invigorat- 
ing atmosphere. The all-important character- 
istic of a great idea is its capacity for the enlarge- 
ment of the human soul. That is its mission. 
God has commissioned it. To make men weary 
of the present, to cause them to yearn with un- 
speakable desire for the future, to break bonds 
that fetter, to loose men and let them go, to 
breathe into the nostrils the breath of a new 
life, to stand at a soul sepulcher and cry, 
"Awake!" to kindle aspirations that can not 
die — this is the mission of a sublime conception. 
And this is its unvarying effect. By a law as 
absolute and exact as that which gathers the 
constellations in its hand it operates on every 
life to which it comes. It comes and goes; but 
the man to whom it came and he from whom 
it departed are not the same. It came, saw, and, 
in a sense, conquered. It came, entered, en- 
larged. It entered to expand the man's life from 
the narrow dimensions of a hovel to the noble 



Rcligio-Social Instinct 59 

proportions of a palace, roomy and vast as a 
Caesar's habitation. It will not always do its 
utmost. This will depend on him to whom it 
comes. But there is this certainty : It will never 
leave a soul as narrow as before its admission. 
The entertainment of an idea is proof positive 
of enlargement. This is a law invariable as 
destiny. 

I had always known the sea was vast. I had 
no conception that the Atlantic was a pond 
where fisher lads ply their tiny trade, nor yet 
that it was a lake that glasses the beauty of the 
hills. I knew it was a huge thing, ''whose sleep 
was like a giant's slumber, loud and deep," and 
whose wakening w^as terrible as a Titan's wrath. 
The word sea always fascinated me like the 
touch of an invisible hand. I was transported 
by it into a realm I can not name, which hath 
not metes nor bounds. But with conceptions 
such as these, which must be allowed to possess 
a flavoring of the truth, I set sail from the har- 
bor. I left Liberty Statue with its uplifted torch 
behind me. I saw the spires vanish in the dis- 
tance. The very shore grew dim and indis- 
dinct. The swell of the ocean smote up against 



6o The Blessed Life 

the vessel's keel. The pilot left us. The sails 
grew fewer. The throb of the engine told a 
prisoner Cyclops underneath was laboring for 
us, and a blind Samson was grinding at our 
mill. The day waned. Behind, the seagull's 
wheeling flight; ahead, the swell of seas and 
bend of sky to touch the upward-reaching flood. 

"The day dies slowly in the western sky, 
The sunset splendor fades.'* 

Behind us is no land. America has sunk like 
some fabled continent out of sight. The stars 
are trimming their lamps for midnight burning. 
Naught but sea and sky. 

"The deep moans round with many voices." 

And I said as I gazed upon the waste where 
fleets had sailed and sunk, 

"There's a wideness in God's mercy 
Like the wideness of the sea," 

and the words seemed set on fire. I could read 
them blazing afar against the sky. ''The wide- 
ness of the sea!" I knew that in a new sense 
now. The sea's barriers seemed moved back- 



Religio-Social Instinct 6i 

ward by hands potential, yet invisible. The 
greatness of the ocean was entering my soul. 
A great idea was wedging its way into my mind. 
So we sailed on from sunset, through the dark- 
ness, and dash and moan of seas, into the dawn. 
All night the engine made the ship a-tremble. 
All day we headed eastward; still no land. Sky, 
sea — sea, sky. Seagulls left astern. Storm- 
petrel flinging itself into the billows. Another 
night. The stars come again. The voice of 
the night-time fills the soul, and again the 
words, 

"There's a widensss in God's mercy 
Like the wideness of the sea," 

come marching through my mind like a troop 
of gigantic forms, and the breadth of the ocean 
seemed a distance I could not measure. The 
vastness appalled me — made me dumb. My 
soul expanded. The idea was transfiguring my 
thought. It was enlarging my life. The sea 
was lifting me into a conception of God, and 
the conception of God w^as glorifying the sea. 
So we sailed on. Three days gone; no shore. 
Four days ended, and no low-lying coast. A 



62 The Blessed Life 

horizon of seas; no more. Five days, six days; 
the vastness grew. Our sailing seemed a shore- 
less venture. Seven days, eight days. Sunset, 
star-rise, sea's surge; and no shore. The en- 
gine has not ceased its panting for a moment. 
The ship has not delayed, but rather has been 
"rejoicing like a strong man to run a race,'' 
and yet no shore; and the words, 'Xike the 
wideness of the sea," overmaster me. I find 
myself saying, ''Wideness, wideness of the sea." 
I am clambering into realms of soul sunrise. 
My thought is girding itself for high endeavor. 
I linger on the word ''wideness" as a mother 
lingers on the name of her dear, departed child. 
I linger upon it, and can but worship Him 
whose love is wide as the vast ocean, or the 
sweep of an infinite sea. I can never forget the 
exhilaration of thought. I can never be as 
small as I once was. It was worth our while 
to dwell on this thought, because such is the 
efifect of every noble idea that enters the soul. 
Its mission is to amplify. The word which em- 
braces it all is, "expansion." 

Keats, in his own inimitable way, has told 



Religio-Social Instinct 63 

his experience in coming face to face with a 
great thought : 

**Then felt I as some watcher of the skies, 
When a new j^lanet swims into his ken ; 

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes 
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men 

Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 
Silent, upon a peak in Darien." 

The elevation of soul which must character- 
ize the man who has beheld some great new 
truth is inconceivable. I have attempted to im- 
agine what emotions Newton experienced when 
he grasped that colossal conception of gravi- 
tation; when he beheld the physical universe 
held as in some giant's hold by this power which 
seemed veritable Omnipotency; when he beheld 
the solar system, aye, and every system, every 
wandering star, every swift-winged comet, every 
meteoric cloud, all far-ofif, dim nebulae, these 
all holden by a power invisible, yet potent as 
Deity. I have attempted to realize his emo- 
tions, but have always failed. It lies beyond 
our power. We may form some imperfect 
notion; but an adequate conception, never. Yet 



64 The Blessed Life 

this is certain. That experience must have been 
rapture; and is it conceivable that Newton, after 
such vision, could be as he once was? Could 
his existence be as commonplace, and his life 
as narrow as before he had entertained this 
unique and majestic idea? I hold it to be self- 
evident that ever thereafter he was, in a high 
sense, a new intellectual creature. To others 
he seemed his old self; but he was conscious 
that he had been translated into a new world. 
Ideas thrust men out into broad places, and 
make life a verity. These constitute our su- 
preme intellectual need. 

Notions are many; ideas are few. The name 
of our fancies is legion; while the ideas which 
have seated themselves in the mind may too 
often be numbered on the digits of a single 
hand. We are as children who play with peb- 
bles. Tiny matters absorb our attention. Sub- 
ordinate affairs crowd to the front. Inferiors 
usurp the place of the great superiors, and take 
the chief seats in our intellectual synagogues. 
This view of the case, while not flattering, is 
just. We need to be upborne. Elevation is a 
prime necessity; and it is pertinent to inquire 



Religio-Social Instinct 6^ 

with utmost solicitude, whence may be derived 
these ''thoughts that wander through eternity/' 
that transform and glorify the soul, that enlarge 
the man till he bear such a faint semblance to 
his former self as the man full-grown bears to 
the babe in arms? Let us address ourselves to 
answering this question. 

God's provision for every need is ample. 
Wherever there is a God-implanted hunger, 
there is also a satisfying portion. Man may be 
niggardly in his giving, but God never is. He 
gives with a generosity which seems the prodi- 
gality of some spendthrift Deity. The limita- 
tion of his benefaction is as the gift of his Spirit; 
and he giveth his Spirit not by measure. My 
life needs thought. Except that hunger be sat- 
isfied, the life must perish; and death shall snuf¥ 
out the light of vitality and leave but darkness. 
But God's creations are not in vain. He doth 
not make to mar. He hath sown thought 
through his creation w^ith an unsparing hand. 
Easier shall the astronomer count the figures 
that march in the marshaled host of midnight 
than man shall number God's thoughts. The 
thoughts of an infinite God are infinite in num- 



66 The Blessed Life 

ber. '1 think God's thoughts/' shouted the en- 
raptured astronomer. This is what every thinker 
does. Who thinks greatly must think God's 
thoughts; for all great thoughts are his. Of 
these we may say, ''God is the maker of them 
all." Even as "every good and every perfect 
gift'' comes from him, so every exalted idea that 
charms the soul into music comes from him. 
He is the Source where infinite fullness dwells. 
While nature is God's thought, the Bible is 
the interpreter of nature, and reaches out of the 
physical into the spiritual; that is, out of Na- 
ture into Grace. Christ is the one word which 
embraces all that is; for "of him and through 
him and to him" are all things. Christ is the 
explanation of physical phenomena, as he is the 
explanation of Spiritual forces. The world has 
long since accorded to Jesus a place among and 
above great moral teachers. Even Rationalism 
does not deny this, but rather asserts it with 
marked emphasis. True it is that Jesus is the 
iconoclast in the realm of morals. He turned 
things upside down. He smote wrong systems 
to the dust. With his scourge of cords he drove 
even licensed sin from his presence. He has put 



Religio-Social Instinct 67 

such a moral force into operation, that, viewed 
only from a human standpoint, he seems des- 
tined to subdue men and dominate the earth. 
But while this is true, while Jesus is the moral 
power to which the race must some time pay 
its homage, while spiritual renovation is his 
chiefest mission, is it not true that he is the 
world's greatest intellectual benefactor? Has 
he had an equal? Is he not the author of ideas 
such as have no peer in all the realm of thought? 
Is he not in the forefront of all that goodly com- 
pany of noble spirits who have given us such 
mental incentives as the soul needs to lift it to 
its true destiny? I would magnify Christ as 
"God manifest in the flesh" for the redemption 
of man and the complete regeneration of his 
nature; but I would also magnify him as being 
in himself and in his ideas the greatest stimu- 
lator to thought the world has been privileged 
to know. The ideas he gave, look at them! 
How great they are ! God, moral responsibility, 
man's ability to know divinity, immortality, 
man's divine origin, providence, moral gravita- 
tion, heart regeneration, God the creator and 
sustainer of all existence and life, human bro- 



68 The Blessed Life 

therhood, and last, himself incarnate God, — 
these, and more, which, if they should be named, 
a man would seem to be calling the roll of the 
greatest ideas the centuries have known. Con- 
tact with such thought is soul elevation. It is 
an education in itself. It constituted the train- 
ing of the Apostolic college; and no man can 
enter into fellowship with the ideas of Christ 
without becoming a man of intellectual vigor. 
Daniel Webster declared that the greatest 
thought he had ever entertained was that of per- 
sonal responsibility to God. Bring a man face 
to face with that thought for the first time, and 
it would blind him with the blaze of its glory. 
The Scotch are the most devout of peoples. 
They are also the keenest thinkers. The Puri- 
tans received both their republicanism and their 
loftiness of thought and morals from the Bible. 
The early Methodist preachers were men whose 
intellectual prowess was approved. They were 
second to none of their time. They challenged 
the attention of their contemporaries, and com- 
manded the respect of thinkers. That mental 
vigor was acquired by standing under the glory 
of the God-thoughts as expressed by Jesus. 



Religio-Social Instinct 69 

He who has wrestled with the ideas that 
Jesus gave is as one who hath fought with gods. 
His thews become as those of the Anakim. 
Christ is an intellectual force. Christianity is 
an intellectual regeneration. 

Christ was at once a revelation and a revo- 
lution. He came to turn the world upside down, 
and was the chief iconoclast of human history. 
Himself was the sower who went forth to sow. 
Jesus came and went. Now, as we look back, 
his passage across our sky seems swift as the 
flight of a falling star. Brief years included his 
ministry. We were but getting ready to enter- 
tain him when he left us, and the heavens re- 
ceived him from our sight. Jesus came and 
went; but the world to which he came, and the 
world from whence he departed, were not the 
same; for he had seeded our earth down to new 
ideas. 

On coming, Jesus found nothing to his hand. 
Though he had waited so long, so long, yet 
nothing seemed ready for his coming. He had 
waited through the weary centuries, expectant, 
eager, saying as he looked earth's way, "Is it 
not ready yet? is it not ready yetf' and at the 



JO The Blessed Life 

last, coming he found himself an unexpected 
guest, nothing ready for him. No home to be 
born in, no Bethlehem to shelter his boyhood, 
no Palestine to let him grow from its soil as a 
"root out of the dry ground;'' but he must needs 
go into Egypt for safety, seeing his very life 
was beset. So barbarous and inhospitable his 
welcome! His Nazareth would fling him from 
its cliffs. His Father's house was not ready for 
him. The Church gave him scant tolerance, 
then menace, scorn, hisses, maledictions, cruci- 
fixion. Society was not ready for him, save that 
it w^as so apathetic it needed waking, so de- 
praved it needed redeeming, so foul it needed 
a troubling of its waters, that health might fol- 
low its disease. O, it shames us now to think 
nothing was ready for him; and he had waited 
so long! I wonder his heart did not break. 
"He came unto his own, and his own received 
him not." Not a door open, nor a voice crying, 
"Welcome.'^ 

And he found not even a speech ready to 
convey his meaning, so bankrupt was our world 
in the appliances of noble thought and life. The 
Greek speech had risen and matured. It was 



Religio-Social Instinct 71 

the most exact, versatile, vigorous, and poetic 
tongue any race had ever used as a vehicle of 
ideas. Greek was a matchless dialect among 
human vernaculars. Philosophers, orators, and 
poets had glorified it. The Greek language had 
learned to express conquest with Alexander, elo- 
quence with Demosthenes, poetry with ^schy- 
lus, and philosophy with Plato. The world has 
been proud of the Greek tongue all these cen- 
turies. Most apt and adequate it was to express 
the intricacies of the most abstruse philosophies, 
and used by Socrates, Plato, Zeno, and Epi- 
curus in apprenticeship until it became satu- 
rated with philosophy as sea-air with odors of 
the wave. God was bringing a speech toward 
readiness for the coming of the Christ. Then 
for two centuries or more this adequate Greek 
language had been brought into contact with 
the Jewish theism and monotheism. At Alex- 
andria the Septuagint had made the Greek 
tongue bear the weight of Psalm, History, and 
Prophecy; and God was making the Greek lan- 
guage go to school to Himself, trying to get it 
ready for his Son. Yet when Christ came he 
found a speech as incompetent to express his 



72 The Blessed Life 

thought as a broken lute to express the music 
in the musician's dream. Jesus took this instru- 
ment, fingered all its stops, put lips to it, and 
found discord, so that at the outset he must 
renovate language. He took the lexicon of the 
imsurpassed Greek tongue, ran down its col- 
umns from Alpha to Omega, and said, ''I can 
not find the word I need." So common our 
world, we could not ofifer God's Son even a word 
wherewith he should speak to us. Thus does 
sin shame us all. What pathos is here ! Noth- 
ing ready for Christ. Yet, there is a view which 
palliates our case a little. How could human 
speech hold God's thought? Can you pour the 
oceans into your drinking-cup? Can you empty 
the skies with their azure and stars into the hol- 
low of a child's hand? This figure is paltry when 
considered in relation to the putting the infinite 
into the finite, God into a man's words. Yet, 
ought there to have been some words competent 
for Divine uses. 

But, consider when Jesus began that exalta- 
tion we name, the Sermon on the Mount, he 
revolutionized speech in the introductory word. 
''Makarioi" was a term applied not to men, but 



Religio-Social Instinct 73 

to gods, and Jesus transports this word into a 
new zone of thought applying it to man. What 
Jesus says as his first word to the world is, 
^'Blessed like the gods are the pure, the meek, 
and the hungry-hearted after righteousness/' 
The ordinary Greek word for life was ''bios," 
but the Greek thought of life as a perishable 
commodity, a thing which had morning, noon, 
and night. Sunset was more certain than sun- 
rise. Is it not apparent, when Jesus would say 
he was ''the Life," he dare not in fealty to truth 
to use such a seared word? Christ, when he 
would say he w^as the eternal life, "from everlast- 
ing to everlasting," the life which had morning, 
but whose sun hung forever at celestial noon, 
the life which might run the gauntlet of the 
grave and get no hurt — Christ took another 
word. He said not, I am the "bios," but, I am 
"Zoe," and thus gave a word with which they 
were conversant, but flooded it with a heavenly 
meaning. So with love. God is love; how 
should Jesus say that? Love is polluted as earth 
has made it. He dare not use the word "Eros." 
This meant Venus and the Grove of Daphne, 
and was polluted like air filled with corruption. 



74 The Blessed Life 

And so Jesus gave us a clean word fresh as the 
first breath of morning waking with the dawn, 
not "eros," but ''agape/' 

And Jesus came for the revelation of God 
and the revolution of the w^orld. His word is, 
"I make all things new," and so he did. No 
great fact was left as he found it. He gave us 
new ideas of love, society, and man and God. 
Does not everybody know that when Jesus left 
the world, man's notion of manhood had been 
revolutionized? As God created man, so God's 
Son created manliness. He revolutionized our 
conceptions, using the old pedestals, but set- 
ting upon them new figures. God seen from 
Sinai was one; God seen by the light of Sinai 
and Calvary was another. Christ showed us 
man and God. 

Christianity speaks because it thinks and has 
a distinct direction given to both thought and 
language. 

The Puritans were saturated with both 
the voice and thought of the Old Testa- 
ment, and thought and spoke with eloquence 
like an epic. Their thoughts were roomy, 
and their words had music like the sound of 



Religio-Social Instinct y^ 

bells. If you will turn your thought to it, 
you will observe how the great poets, from 
Shakespeare to Tennyson, were debtors to God's 
Book. A volume has been written made up 
wholly of Shakespeare's quotations from the 
Bible, and the book is enough to open the eyes 
of any one who reads it, disclosing the immense 
debt of Shakespeare to the Book of God. 
Tennyson not infrequently (three hundred times) 
quotes from the Bible. The great orators fill 
their speech with lordly Scripture phrase and 
example. The King James Version of our 
Scriptures came into being when every English 
writer seemed prodigal of genius, the result 
being that their words were full of music and 
majesty, and found fit spokesmen in the Eng- 
lish spoken and written then when it seemed 
rich as the wine squeezed from clusters grown 
on the Southern slopes, and as chaste, vigor- 
ous, musical, cumulative in effect, appealing to 
our deeper spiritual and literary instincts, — this 
old version teaches thought how to phrase itself 
in melody and might. Christianity has language 
not solely as a vehicle of religious expression, 
but as vehicle of all the nobler movements of 



76 The Blessed Life 

the soul. The divinity of the Book of God is 
its charter of appeal. Friendship, love, struggle, 
narrative, poetry as jubilant as triumphant, so- 
norous as Milton's wonderful measures, familiar 
intercourse, friendly letters — read the Scriptures, 
for all this is found there. 

Two things stand out in the Scripture idea 
of society; namely, neighborliness and friend- 
ship. You might call the New Testament the 
book of neighbors and friends, if you so chose. 
Since Jesus said, ''You are my friends if you do 
my commandments," and ''Henceforth I call you 
not servants, but friends," friendship has come 
to have a value celestial as well as terrestrial. 
Jesus' friendships are beautiful beyond expres- 
sion. Jesus loved Lazarus, and friendship never 
had soared so high since the gallant days when 
David and Jonathan were knit together. So 
beautiful that long-gone love, that David, in his 
Elegy, said, "Thy love to me was wonderful, 
passing the love of women." This was what the 
sad-hearted Psalmist sang. But here was Da- 
vid's Son and David's Lord — Son after the flesh, 
Lord after the spirit — who was to write a new 
chapter in the history of friendship. You must 



Religio-Social Instinct jj 

see the household of Bethany. Dull of sight 
must men be who can not see Mary and Martha 
and Lazarus, and Jesus as their guest; and one 
of the rarest pictures in Tennyson's ''In Memo- 
riam" limns this dear, old, never-to-be-forgotten 



scene : 



**When Lazarus left his chamel-cave, 
And home to Mary's house return' d, 
Was this demanded — if he yearn' d 
To hear her weeping by his grave? 

'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?' 
There Hves no record of reply, 
WTiich telling what it is to die 

Had surely added praise to praise. 

From every house the neighbors met. 
The streets were filled with joyful sound, 
A solemn gladness even crown' d 

The purple brows of Olivet. 

Behold a man raised up by Christ! 

The rest remaineth unreveal'd; 

He told it not; or something seal'd 
The lips of that Evangelist. 

Her eyes are homes of silent prayer, 
Nor other thought her mind admits, 
But he was dead, and there he sits, 

And he that brought him back is there. 



78 The Blessed Life 

Then one deep love doth supersede 
All other, when her ardent gaze 
Roves from the living brother's face, 

And rests upon the Life indeed. 

All subtle thought, all curious fears, 
Borne down by gladness so complete, 
She bows, she bathes the Savior's feet 

With costly spikenard and with tears. 

Thrice blest whose lives are faithful prayers 
"Whose loves in higher love endure ; 
What souls possess themselves so pure. 

Or is there blessedness like theirs?" 

We can never forget this sight. He and 
friendship are forever more sanctified. Friend- 
ship may always find temper and speech in this 
sacred home circle. And Jesus' talks with his 
disciples had such a wealth of tender consider- 
ation in them. I never can forget the Scripture 
phrase in Jesus' saying, "Come apart and rest 
a little," as if himself were not weary well-nigh 
unto death! But true to himself, he thinks of 
them! And he appears to Mary of Magdala, 
and sends a personal, tender message to Peter, 
who had denied him thrice ! Where is there such 
an example of courtesy and friendship as this 
friendship of Jesus Christ? 



Religio-Social Instinct 79 

And Paul — how friends clustered about him ! 
Reading his letters, one is constrained to think 
this man did nothing else than to make friends. 
But that is one of the many beauties and emolu- 
ments of the minister of Christ. He makes 
friends at every turn. He has lovers, and lovers 
innumerable. He will know legions of friends 
the moment he steps inside of heaven. And 
Paul has friends that love him with love as ample 
as the gospel. Doctor Luke, who is his phy- 
sician (seeing Paul has a thorn in the flesh; 
namely, some physical distemper which necessi- 
tated a physician traveling with him constantly), 
Doctor Luke, how dear he is to Paul, and how 
dear Paul is to him! The story of these sweet 
friendships never has been written, and never 
will be. Mayhap in heaven we shall be privileged 
to hear these lovers tell the story of their hearts 
as they shall walk, hand clasped in hand, along 
the fair slopes of the hills of light. Than that 
parting of Paul from the Ephesians, there is no 
deeper pathos mixed with heavenly hope in all 
the world of letters or the Book of God: 

^'And from Miletus he sent to Ephesus, and 
called the elders of the Church. And when they 



8o The Blessed Life 

were come to him, he said unto them, Ye know, 
from the first day that I came into Asia, after 
what manner I have been with you at all sea- 
sons, serving the Lord with all humility of mind, 
and with many tears, and temptations, which 
befell me by the lying in wait of the Jews : and 
how I kept back nothing that was profitable 
unto you, but have shewed you, and have taught 
you publicly, and from house to house, testify- 
ing both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, 
repentance toward God, and faith toward our 
Lord Jesus Christ. And now, behold, I go 
bound in the spirit unto Jerusalem, not know- 
ing the things that shall befall me there. And 
now, brethren, I commend you to God, and to 
the word of his grace, which is able to build 
you up, and to give you an inheritance among 
all them which are sanctified. I have coveted 
no man's silver, or gold, or apparel. Yea, ye 
yourselves know that these hands have minis- 
tered unto my necessities, and to them that were 
with me. I have shewed you all things, how 
that so laboring ye ought to support the weak, 
and to remember the words of the Lord Jesus, 
how he said. It is more blessed to give than to 



Religio-Social Instinct 8i 

receive. And when he had thus spoken, he 
kneeled down and prayed with them all. And 
they all wept sore, and fell on Paul's iwck and 
kissed him, sorrowing, most of all, for the words 
which he spake, that they should see his face 
no more. And they accompanied him unto the 
ship." 

And as for neighbors did not Jesus say, 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself?" and 
did he not pronounce a parable to prove that 
he who needs help and he who ministers help 
are neighbors and neighborly? To do good is 
to get good. To help is to make a neighbor. 
What a neighborly book the Bible is, and what 
neighborly souls the apostles were! Peter's 
shadow was medicine, and John and Peter cried 
to the lame man, "Silver and gold have we none, 
but such as we have give we unto thee," and 
this man they have made a neighbor ran up the 
temple steps with laughter and delight and 
thanksgiving unto God. 

There are no neighbors and friends like those 

who have "tasted the powers of the world to 

come." Neighbors and friends in earth, and 

neighbors and friends in heaven for evermore! 
6 



A PRAYER 

OUR loving Father y we would humbly pray^ with the devout 
astronomer y that we might think Thy thoughts after thee. They are 
so high, so enthralling to the m.ind, so compelling to every worthy 
motion of the spirit, so dwarfing to the unworthy in us and about 
uSy so fitted to our natures and our supernatures. Our heights are 
made for the gathering about them^ of the gracious clouds of Thy 
high thoughts. We bless Thee for our sight of Thy ways which are 
very wonderful, but in particular for the sight of Thyself, which 
equips our thought for flights and our love for sacrifice and devo- 
tion. May we pattern our thinking after Thine, so that it shall be 
pure and vigorous and predestined to noble ends ! May we have 
the mind that was in Christ, whatever that great phrase may mean ! 
Keep MS far removed from the ignoble, whether in thought or i??iag- 
ination or sport or friendship or occupation. May we be holy, and 
so, free to turn our iiiight to God'* s own uses, we pray in Jesus' 
name ! Arnen^ 



CHAPTER V 
Christianity and Law 



^^Let e^ery soul he subject under the higher powers'^ 

"Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and po^coers, 

to obey magistrates '' 
^^ Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you 

more than unto God, judge ye " 



TOO LATE 

He came when all the lists were filled, 
And sought a place on honor's field; 
In vain were helmet, spear, and shield, 

Or arm that was for tourney skilled. 

Who comes too late, comes but in vain ; 

All knightly skill is nothing worth ; 

His plenty is as desert dearth ; 
A moment had been deathless gain. 



IN the home, man learns obedience. Rule is his 
logical inference. He rises to a sense of law. 
Ought is in his conscience, which thrusts on 
his mind a conviction of law and of sin. By 
such hypothesis alone can you explain the rise 
of States and the sovereignty of kings. Kings 
can not be explained by force. They have not 
had enough. They were but one man against 
millions of men. Force explains nothing. It 
is incompetent to explain the visible facts of his- 
tory. But the human spirit has an instinct for 
law. Man feels for it, feels the need of it, and, 
thinking he recognizes law incarnate in kings, 
submits, just as Montezuma submitted to Cor- 
tez, because he thought him a predestined con- 
queror. 

Thus man tends to be citizen. He makes 
many mistakes as to what authority really is, 
and what authority demands his allegiance, more 
is the pity; but a disposition to obey authority 

and acknowledge law^ is in him. He will obey 

85 



86 The Blessed Life 

Domitian, or Gustavus Adolphus, or Charles I, 
or Washington; not with clear view of the right- 
eousness nor of the turpitude of the ruler, but 
with dominant instinct for law-authority some- 
where. 

Here, as everywhere, Christianity is human 
and rational. The Christian has no standing 
quarrel with law nor governors; indeed, the re- 
verse is the case. "Live peaceably with all men 
if it be possible," is the enjoinder, and the scope 
of this injunction includes States and rulers. But 
God's Word is more specific, enjoining in ex- 
pressed terms obedience to rulers on the ground 
that they are of God. God is a God of law, and 
not of lawlessness nor disorder. He believes in 
cosmos, not chaos, and this not only in a phys- 
ical, but in a legal and moral world. The Chris- 
tian is not anarchist. He believes in and obeys 
law. Christianity wisely views the State as a 
necessity; but does not allow that every State 
is just nor legitimate. There is no Scriptural 
ground for belief in divine right of kings. Chris- 
tianity believes in the divine right of righteous- 
ness, holding fast to the Scripture affirmation, 
''Righteousn>ess exalteth a nation, but sin is a 



Christianity and Law 87 

disgrace to any people." ''The soul that sin- 
neth, it shall die/' is true, but not more true than 
that the nation that sinneth, it shall die. ''J^" 
rusalem hath grievously sinned, therefore is she 
removed," is Jeremiah's putting of the theory 
of sin's effect upon a nation as discovered in 
history. 

To a Christian there are two lawgivers, God 
and the State — the Divine and the civil. God's 
law is supreme. To God the Christian must 
yield an implicit obedience. God is good, and 
doeth good and commands righteously. The 
ultimate law of right is not the command of 
God, but the character of God. Right is not 
right because God commanded it, but because 
his commands are in consonance with his char- 
acter, and ''God is light, and in him is no dark- 
ness at all." He can not even be tempted with 
evil. His commands reflect himself as the sun 
affirms its own luminosity. This point is crucial 
in any discussion of theoretical ethics. If God's 
simple command makes right, then if he had 
commanded covetousness instead of generosity, 
then would covetousness be right, and non- 
covetousness wrong. But if God's commands 



88 The Blessed Life 

emanate from God's character and are the fruit 
of it, there is then nothing arbitrary in his law 
nor in our obligations. The Christian is to obey 
God supremely. If the State commands what 
God forbids, the Christian's reply is, "We ought 
to obey God rather than man.'' He has no 
option. Nor has the State an option. It must 
enforce its laws, and the Christian must suffer. 
Four things are apparent: i. The Christian 
must obey God in preference to the State. Or- 
dinarily there is no conflict between the two. 
2. The Christian must obey the State when such 
obedience does not conflict with his service of 
God. 3. In case of a conflict between the law 
of God and the law of the State the Christian 
must suffer. 4. The Christian, as a Christian, 
should labor assiduously to reverse the conflict 
between civil and Divine authority in case such 
conflict exists. Such has been the operative 
ethics of Christianity always. Persecution was 
native to early Christianity. It asserted its inno- 
cence of evil, but suffered the consequence of 
disobedience to civil authority; but ultimately 
effected a change in the human code, making it 
in harmony with the Divine code. Baxter and 



Christianity and Law 89 

Bunyan sufifered under the civil law, but by their 
suffering helped to its abolition. The Hugue- 
nots listened to God, obeyed him, suffered for 
his sake by thousands and ten-thousands; and 
of whom we may say in the language of He- 
brews, ''The world was not worthy." 

To say that a Christian is a Christian first 
and a citizen afterwards is scarcely just, because 
such observation marks a clear division between 
the two things; whereas, I think it clear that the 
Christian is a citizen because he is a Christian. 
No Christian is obstreperous. He does not 
harry the State, does not prate and pose nor 
play the demagogue, nor yet the mugwump, but 
is stalwart. He loves his native land, and for 
it lives, and, if the need demands, for it he dies. 
He is no dreamy, impracticable reformer, but 
walks the earth with a manly and non-spasmodic 
interest in its vital concerns. He stands for 
righteous laws, God being his standard of right. 

By nature (i. c, his regenerate nature) he is 
a foe to evil in conduct or legislation. He is 
God's licensed champion of right. Thus his 
movements become rational and progressive. 
He believes in religion but does not of neces- 



90 The Blessed Life 

sity believe in a State religion, nor in enactments 
nor appropriations in its behalf. He believes in 
God and God's cause, but thinks to apostle them, 
not by legislation, but by Divine dynamics — by 
the "mighty power of God." He believes that 
morality should be legislated for, but not re- 
ligion. He does not want his creed settled upon 
others, he wishing to worship God freely and 
give others an equal opportunity. He favors 
goodness passing into the codes. The best laws 
are the ones he has in heart; but if he be wise 
he will advocate and help a better law as a route 
to best laws. Hence a Christian needs to be 
on guard. He may become a fanatic; and fanat- 
ics are baneful. 

So Christianity in a political way wants to 
help, and not to hinder. The Christian is op- 
posed to slavery, to gambling, to lotteries, to 
impure literature, to inhuman treatment of ani- 
mals or children, is opposed to narcotics and 
intoxicants because they are foes to public mo- 
rality. They sin against religion truly, but they 
sin against the State. They are bad economics, 
and as a citizen his face is against them for evil. 
His attitude toward these various evils may be 



Christianity and Law 91 

justly illustrated by Professor Woodruff's atti- 
tude toward the Louisiana Lottery. He was 
sick and confined to his own room. He had 
saved from his earnings something less than a 
thousand dollars. To this sick man in his sick 
chamber the thought occurred that he might use 
his enforced leisure toward the abolition of a 
stupendous crime against society and against the 
Nation. When one thinks of it, what holy au- 
dacity it was that a sick man and a poor man 
should think to dethrone a healthy and enor- 
mously rich infamy; but this man, trusting in 
God, counted not odds, believing with the man 
of God evidently, "that those who are with us 
are more than those that be against us," and so 
set about flooding the country with arguments 
against lottery and gambling; and to abbreviate 
the history I shall state the result. This sick 
professor, with his petty savings, warred so suc- 
cessfully against a giant iniquity that he not only 
dethroned it, but drove it from the Nation as if 
it had been a vagabond king. 

Another item illustrative of the same truth 
is nearer to us in point of time. I refer to the 
anti-canteen law passed by a recent Congress. 



92 The Blessed Life 

Government posts and camps were scenes of de- 
bauchery, as must always be the case where the 
saloon has any part. There are no decent sa- 
loons; for, to utter a solecism, the more decent 
a saloon is, the more indecent it is, for the rea- 
son that the less a saloon shows its real char- 
acter of a debaucher of manhood, the more dan- 
gerous it is. If every saloon could have the 
drunkards it has made shrieking with delirium 
tremens at its door, or lying in rags and shame 
on the walk before it, saloons would not be the 
menace to morals they now are. But Christian 
citizenship took deliberate and vigorous stand 
against the canteen, which had been in evidence 
during the recent war with Spain. Many de- 
manded that the President should abolish it, 
Which he, as I think, wisely refused to do, be- 
cause such order had been simply temporary, 
affecting immediate but not lasting good. The 
wiser plan was pursued: Congress in bath 
Houses was besieged by petitions demanding a 
law for the abolition of the canteen, and among 
the last and greatest enactments of a Congress, 
which will be illustrious in the Nation's history 
forever, was a law for the abolition of the can- 



Christianity and Law 93 

teen. This anti-canteen law the Attorney- 
General declared to be illegal, and the law in 
consequence was nullified. The disappointment 
and chagrin of friends of temperance was some- 
thing distressing. They had fought a good fight 
and won, and heard in their hearts the notes 
of triumph, when suddenly their joy was turned 
into mourning. The plain intent of the law on 
the part of those who enacted it was to abolish 
the canteen. Nobody doubted that. Many 
maintained that the purpose of those who 
framed and passed the law should be taken into 
account in passing on its legality, a ground 
which can not be soberly maintained for a mo- 
ment. Legality is not a question of what was 
intended. Law is law. The intention of legis- 
lators has never been allowed to be a test of 
legality, and to make such appeal at that time 
was hysterical, unhistorical, and unfair, and a 
dangerous precedent besides. Two attitudes 
were evidenced. One, the attitude of abuse of 
the Attorney-General and the President. The 
appeal was to vituperation, which is never 
shrewd in a bad cause or a good. The abuse of 
authorities by this type of reformer (not ques- 



94 The Blessed Life 

tioning their motives) was outrageous, ques- 
tioning the motives of all involved, demanding 
the President should override the decision of 
the Attorney-General, and the like. This 
method of abuse, as any rememberer of history 
could have prophesied, achieved no results, save 
to disgust a goodly number of sincere friends of 
temperance. The second and saner attitude was 
to apply the same methods to the repassing of 
the bill as had been used in the original passage; 
namely, using the right of petition. Congress 
was flooded with memorials asking the passage 
of an anti-canteen measure which should stand 
the test of law. The members of the Senate 
and House are as concerned in the moral order 
of the country as any other body of citizens, a 
fact frequently lost sight of by the citizen. Non- 
officeholders do not monopolize conscience, nor 
a desire for the public weal. The right of pe- 
tition, inalienable to the citizen, was used. Abuse 
was not thought of or tolerated. The right in- 
tention of President or Cabinet officer was not 
once questioned, but the whole moral and po- 
litical might was occupied in trying to get a legal 
law enacted. Mr. Bowersock, of Kansas, hav- 



Christianity and Law 95 

ing introduced such a bill, the pressure from 
lovers of temperance became enormous, the gen- 
eral ground being that, even apart from the dam- 
aging effects on our soldiers, this concession to 
the moral scruples of millions of Christians might 
well be made. With no one could the mainte- 
nance of the canteen be a matter of conscience, 
while to multitudes the abolition of it was a mat- 
ter of conscience; so that, as a result of this 
sane and fair campaign, a new anti-canteen law 
was passed, and the canteen abolished. This 
history can not fail to emphasize the method of 
sobriety and manliness in attitude and method. 
The abusive fanatics had no influence as for the 
re-enactment of the law, but against it. They 
excited public indignation, but wrought no 
moral benefit, while the sane friends of temper- 
ance came, saw, and conquered. 

This represents the legitimate attitude of the 
Christian as a citizen. In sane and determined 
opposition is the good man's might. Ultimately 
he may as legislator be able to "do all things 
through Christ which strengtheneth him." 
Slavery he must oppose; but singularly enough 
Jesus said nothing about slavery. This has puz- 



96 The Blessed Life 

zled many; but Christ made no catalogue of 
vices. The apostles did that. Jesus enunciated 
principles, the apostles and ourselves applied 
them. At no time did Jesus file a bill of com- 
plaint against slavery, though in his parables he 
makes mention of this class of men. This was 
Jesus' larger method: He said all men were 
brothers, and that doctrine will inevitably de- 
stroy slavery when and because it comes into the 
blood of the world. The way we know this is 
that it has done it. Where Christianity goes, 
slave-trading and slavery are abolished. Frost 
can not stand before the sun, nor can slavery 
before the gospel. It melts away utterly. Nor 
did the apostles enjoin manumitting slaves; but 
the philosophy of manumission is given in words 
strong and tender in Paul's letter to Philemon. 
Instant liberation of slaves and the apostling of 
such a crusade had been suicide to Church and 
State in the days of the organization of Chris- 
tianity. The slave must be Christianized first 
before he could become a safe freedman. The 
gospel, in the meantime, did alleviate his con- 
dition. It softened his lot to the point of being 
palatable. It reversed those hideous codes re- 



Christianity and Law 97 

garding slaves which existed in the Roman Em- 
pire — codes more terrible in severity than any 
one not famihar v^ith classic Roman civilization 
can ever guess; and ultimately the gospel freed 
the slaves, though even this wrs done too hastily, 
and sowed the Roman Empire with beggars, 
who in turn intensified the prevalent poverty. 
Christ's methods are grown methods. ''First 
the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the 
ear,'' w^as Christ's outline of his own method in 
the world, both relative to the gospel and society 
in general. 

Now take a contemporaneous question — 
Temperance. What about it? How shall a 
Christian behave in regard to the suppressal of 
intemperance? His objective is total prohi- 
bition, as I assume. He is total abstainer, seeing 
God said, ''Touch not, taste not, handle not." 
He may believe in wine as medicine, as Paul ad- 
vised Timothy, "Take a little wine for thy stom- 
ach's sake and for thine often infirmities," which 
w^as purely a medicinal use. He believes in total 
prohibition, because he believes "Woe unto him 
that putteth the bottle to his neighbor's lips." 
Christians are not to use the accursed thing. 



98 The Blessed Life 

Now this is his goal; but the question is, How 
shall he as a citizen behave so as to bring about 
the end he most desires? Here good and wise 
men differ. Is not this clear, however, that the 
Christian should do all he can to hinder the 
curse? If he can not get total prohibition he 
should take what he can get. He should fall 
in with the forces marching his way. He should 
not favor license, as I suppose, but may favor a 
high license system, because it is a legal-hinder- 
ing force. Some say, ''The liquor-traffic can 
never be legalized without sin," a statement false, 
specious, and misleading. High license in this 
sense is not meant as a legalizing process, but as 
an illegalizing process. It reduces the number 
of saloons. Taking that view, how right and 
wise for a Christian man to favor high license, 
not as an end, but as a helper to an end ! I have 
known Prohibitionists who would do nothing to 
suppress the liquor evil unless in their specific 
way. They hindered, and did not help. They 
meant to be conscientious and logical advocates 
of temperance. Were they? Anything that acts 
with a view toward suppressal is safe, sane, wise, 
and Christian. 



Christianity and Law 99 

This writer's presumption is that no party 
propagandism of temperance is the rapid way 
to secure the best results. We are apt to sup- 
pose that resolutions are actually achieving 
something. They are, in fact, practically use- 
less, having been used so much and to such 
slight effect. They become so frequent as to 
become laughable. No resolution can abolish 
intemperance. No party statement against in- 
temperance can abolish it. No law enacted by 
Congress could abolish it unless public sentiment 
is sufficiently charged with antipathy to the 
liquor-traffic to enforce such laws. Let us look 
facts in the face. Let us cease to be chimerical, 
and learn to be practical. Did the Fifteenth 
Amendment give the black man his rights? Any 
reasonably intelligent man knows it did not. In 
governmental theory it gave him a ballot; in 
fact, it did not and can not. The State Govern- 
ment overrides the Federal Government, and 
will do so until a sense of righteousness is fos- 
tered and grown in those States where the black- 
man-rule is imminent. Let this serve as an 
object-lesson to theorists and reformers. What 
is needed in temperance reform is to push the 

LcfC. 



loo The Blessed Life 

battle to the gates, is to vote for temperance in 
all parties, and not in one party. Let Demo- 
crat, Republican, and Populist vote on their own 
tickets for temperance, and not be asked to leave 
their party to become temperance advocates by 
ballot. Is not this in harmony with what we 
know of discreet legislative methods and judi- 
cious and far-seeing statesmanship? ^^^^ 

The Christian governmental attitude is en- 
tirely democratic. Not that he will always favor 
democracy, for that is not always possible, and 
not always wise when possible. No one who has 
familiarized himself with the history of Central 
and South American Republics but must know 
those people are not competent for self-govern- 
ment even yet. We hope they will be some 
day. Cromwell found England in his day not 
equal to self-government. He was driven not 
by ambition, but by political sagacity to assume 
control of England. Either that, or anarchy, 
or Charles 11. The Fifth Monarchy men be- 
lieved in a republic; but men were not advanced 
far enough for it. They were educated only after 
years of practical self-rule in another hemisphere. 
Puritans in America could do and did do what 



Christianity and Law loi 

Puritans in England were not qualified to do. 
But Christian England has grown steadily in 
democracy of attitude and law. Constitutional 
monarchy is really under bonds to democracy. 
Christianity sees clearly the quality of men, and 
in legislation and in the enforcement of justice 
holds to that theory with inflexible determina- 
tion. 

Christianity under law then fronts God, walks 
his way with alert mind, open to the best meth- 
ods, eager in thought and action for the en- 
thronement of God in the codes and conduct of 
the Nation and the world. 



A PRAYER 

WE are glad Thou hast made us factors efficient^ significant in 
this world"* s arithmetic. We are grateful to be integers, not zeros. 
We are grateful to feel the world needs us to walk on its crowded 
streets and to mix our blood and brain with the world"* s policies and 
potencies. We bless God that in m-arket-place and in schools and 
Church and libraries and primaries and mechanical and far7n- 
ing industries — in all of these things we are to feel ourselves quite 
at home, and are to do with our might what our hands find to do. 
Keep us from the inanity of day-dreaminess and lotus-eating. 
Make us God^s citizens, strong to inject into the veins of govern- 
ment the warm and ruddy life blood of the gospel of our Christ, 
Keep us from the perverseness of seeing men as trees walking. 
Deliver us from the invalid spirit. Make us gleeful betij?ies as 
little children let loose from school, and make us so because we believe 
in God, and who believes in Him must keep a blessed cheer always 
in his heart, for our God has promised to bring virtue to victory, 
and he has not failed us yet. Make us optimists as citizens whose 
strength shall not be palsied by the gloom of undue doubts, but 
make us influences in our communities to shape for helpfulness 
every good thing under heaven. This prayer we 7nake as citizens 
in the name of Christ* Amen* 



CHAPTER VI 
Christianity as Day-Laborer 



*^Go m)ork in my ^ineya.rd^' 

**Noi slothful in business " 

^'Provide things honest in the sight of all men " 



HARVESTLESS 

The plot of earth God gave to me to till, 

I tilled it not; but let the morning pass 

While dewy beauty kindled on the grass 

Its thousand lamps of wondrous flame to fill 

The soul with ecstasy. I heard the trill 

Of birds at dawn. I heard, but yet, alas ! 

I heeded not. The clouds of dawning glass 

Their new-lit glory from the lake and rill, — 

All this swift like a vision passed; but I 

Nor plowed nor sowed. The brown earth knew no toil 

Of mine. The while fair day swept by, the soil 

That yearned for sowing, yearned in vain. Gone by 

God's hour. No sheaf of gold is mine. The sky 

Bums red with sunset. Ilarvestless I die. 



CHRISTIANITY believes in work, and dis- 
believes in idleness. Paul's idea was that 
if a man will not work, neither shall he eat — a 
plan of getting rid of the lazy by starving them; 
but unfortunately they are parasites, and will not 
be destroyed. They suck nutriment from the in- 
dustrious. The lazy are always with us. 

The Bible is so many people's book as to 
make a writer hesitate to name all classes to 
which it legitimately belongs and appeals, lest 
he be thought guilty of straining a point and 
using ingenuity instead of critical accuracy. Yet 
is the Bible the day-laborer's book pre-emi- 
nently. It is the book of work. Everybody in 
the Bible is working — prophets, kings, holy 
women, liberators, high priests, apostles, angels 
("are they not all ministering spirits?"), Christ, 
the Holy Spirit, and God the Father. A spirit 
of strenuous toil has seized on everybody en- 
gaged in the mission of holiness. "In the be- 
ginning God created the heavens and the earth." 

105 



io6 The Blessed Life 

God at work is the opening utterance of the 
Scriptures. How good that is ! How elevating 
to toil! No Brahm sunk in eternal slumber; 
for even God's rest is toil continuous and prod- 
igal; as Jesus says, ''My Father worketh hitherto 
and I work," meaning that what God was doing 
incessantly by the approved processes of nature, 
that Jesus did by the emergent method of mir- 
acle. God the Father and God the Son at work, 
such is the sublime spectacle presented a mass 
of toiling men and women. Then, as if to lift us 
to a heaven of holy activity, Paul briefly tells 
us we are laborers together with God. God 
and ourselves are at the same task; so are we 
helped. According to the opening chapters of 
Revelation (and I am inclined to think them not 
allegory nor myth), the first man highly en- 
dowed, not an ill-bred ape, but a full-bred man, 
into whose nostrils God breathed the breath of 
life with the result that he became a living soul — 
such a man was put at work, and certain we are 
that the second Adam was a toiler, at once "the 
carpenter's son" and "the carpenter;'' for, won- 
dering, the people asked, "Is not this the car- 
penter?'' After the flesh Christ sprung out of 



Christianity as Day-Laborer 107 

a working household, and was sympathetic with 
and obedient to its traditions. He was a work- 
ing man his Hfe through. No rift of rest in the 
clouded sky of his uninterrupted toil; ''Himself 
bore our griefs;'' and in somber grandeur, 
clouded but glorious, it is observed, ''He, bear- 
ing his cross, went forth." And men of toil he 
made his apostles, his bodyguard and cabinet. 
He called fishermen, and changed the place of 
their labor, not the fact of their labor, saying, 
"Come, and I will make you fishers of men,'' a 
task more arduous, as themselves found, than 
any toil all night with fishers' nets at sea. Paul 
was a tentmaker, and worked at his toil for a 
living while he preached "Christ and him cru- 
cified." Sparta had soldier-citizens whose sole 
objective was battle, and Helots were their work- 
ers, whose menial office was common toil. 
Athens had citizens whose office was statecraft, 
generalship, art, eloquence, and poetry, and a 
merchant class not citizens, because to engage 
in such vocation was to disfranchise Athenian 
citizens. Such was Attic democracy. Among 
the Hindoos the Brahmin is the higher class, 
and not only does not work, but will be polluted 



io8 The Blessed Life 

if associated with the class that does work; or 
if even the shadow of a laborer fall across his 
food in passing, that food is accursed. In Roman 
aristocracy the patrician commanded slaves, did 
work by proxy, was not himself a laborer, but 
was by trade a voluptuary and a pest. The 
plebeian did the work, and slaves sweated, and 
sweated blood oftener than sweat, in the cruel 
toil for these Roman aristocrats. How radical 
the divergence in Jesus and in God's Book in 
regard to attitude toward labor! What dis- 
tances divide the attitudes ! Jesus insisted, "Go 
work in my vineyard," and bade them haste, 
and the sadness of the commission lay in ''For 
the night cometh, when no man can work." 
Everybody at work is the New Testament order, 
and for the matter of that it is the Old Testa- 
ment order as well. The Jew taught every son 
a trade, whereby he at once showed the high 
esteem in which he held labor and the brainy 
attention to the detail of life which might wisely 
be emulated by parents in the present day. The 
honorableness and necessity of toil is the gospel 
of the Old Testament and the New. 

And the figures used in the apostolic writings 



Christianity as Day-Laborer 109 

are sweaty with toil. Hear Paul: ''To the weak 
became I as weak, that I might gain the weak : 
I am made all things to all men, that I might 
by all means save some. And this I do for the 
gospel's sake, that I might be partaker thereof 
with you. Know" ye not that they which run 
in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize? 
So run, that ye may obtain. And every man 
that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all 
things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible 
crown; but we are incorruptible. I therefore 
so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one 
that beateth the air; but I keep under my body, 
and bring it into subjection; lest that by any 
means, w^hen I have preached to others, I my- 
self should be a castaway." 

The word deacon means a man of work, a 
servant. And Paul was, at the zenith of his ex- 
altation, ''a servant of the Lord Jesus Christ." 
Jesus girded himself with a towel and washed 
the disciples' feet, and from this doing drew this 
helpful and inspiring lesson: ''Ye call me Mas- 
ter and Lord; and ye say well; for so I am. If 
I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your 
feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. 



no The Blessed Life 

For I have given you an example, that ye should 
do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say 
unto you. The servant is not greater than his 
lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that 
sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye 
if ye do them." Whereby the honorableness of 
the most humiliating toil (for the washing of 
guests' feet was the office of the lowest slave) 
was asserted so as to be unforgettable for ever- 
more. Jesus 'Vent about doing good." Paul 
enjoins, 'Xet him that stole steal no more; but 
rather let him labor, working with his hands 
the thing which is good, that he may have to give 
to him that needeth." And he explains that his 
own laboring with his hands for a Hvelihood 
was not that his ministerial labors were not 
worthy of their hire, but that he worked as an 
example to those whose pastor he was, that they 
might, taking him as an example, become en- 
gaged in some honorable livelihood. 

In the gospel view not only is labor not dis- 
honorable, but highly honorable, and idleness 
dishonorable. Christianity makes people indus- 
trious, workers and not spongers; nor ever looks 
upon labor as a misfortune, but rather as a rare 



Christianity as Day-Laborer 1 1 1 

and continuous good fortune. So that in the 
new political economy of Christianity, to have 
a work, to be necessary, is to be blest and happy. 
The work a man does is the moral gauge of his 
value to society; so has Christ dominated in the 
economic theories of the world. 

A second fact, big with importance, is the 
place of poverty in the kingdom of God. A 
sort of keyword in this Beatitude : 

''Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is 
the kingdom of God." With Christ there are 
no tears for poverty, nor sneers at its patched 
and ragged indigence, but a turning toward it 
a smiling face and lips parting in beatitude. 
Christ and the gospel never intimated that pov- 
erty is a misfortune. Such an idea never found 
place in their thought. Out of penury Jesus 
sprang; out of poverty came the apostles and 
the early Church. Heaven is to be peopled 
largely with the poor, because the poor are a 
majority in our earth. I find in the gospel no 
intimation that Jesus had in mind to banish 
poverty from the world, whereas his "The poor 
ye have always with you," conjoined with the 
apostolic insistence on giving to the poor, might 



112 The Blessed Life 

suggest at least the notion that Christianity did 
not propose the actual elimination of poverty. 
Honorable poverty is no curse. Criminal pov- 
erty is the world's bane. Crime makes poverty. 
Religion unmakes poverty. The good man has 
thrift, economy, forecast, industry; and this part- 
nership will in most instances make for him a 
tolerable livelihood. Beggars decrease with 
spreading Christianity. As Christianity makes 
for commerce by multiplying wants, so Chris- 
tianity makes for self-support by teaching hon- 
esty, frugality, and industry. 

Another principle in the economics of the gos- 
pel is the retention of individuality in labor and 
laborer. Christ is against numbering, and in 
favor of naming, as has been pointed out ear- 
lier in this treatise. The labor reformer whose 
schemes for amelioration include a mechanical 
system in place of a human and psychological 
system, will find the stars fighting against him 
as they did against Sisera. God is for the man. 
The invective against modern machinery (vilified 
often as a foe to the intelligence of the laborer 
because machinery thinks for him) probably 
overlooks certain facts. One is that the routine 



Christianity as Day-Laborer i i 3 

labor never did require a superfluity of thought. 
Does the lapidary art require a heavy draft on 
mind? Did the working of the old hand-loom 
require largely from intelligence? Does the 
blacksmith's toil strenuously tax his intellect? 
Does the farmer's work tax his brain heavily? 
There is much myth in alarm over machinery. 
A second fact is that even if less intelligence is 
required now than formerly to conduct a manu- 
facturing process, yet the shortened hours of 
labor more than compensate in mental oppor- 
tunity. No artisan need be a flabby intellect. 
No necessity is on him. He has time enough 
to make him a scholar in any field if he apply 
himself in his hours of leisure. I have taken 
pains in a variety of localities to study the in- 
tellectual opportunity of the artisan, and find 
that his ignorance, if ignorant he is, arises not 
usually from the lack of chance, but from the 
non-use of chance. He studies amusement 
rather than benefit. The theater (leaving the 
entire question of its moral effect out of the 
view) is as great a foe to the intelligence of the 
working classes as can be imagined, and this 

because in the continually going to theaters 
8 



114 The Blessed Life 

to be amused they become intellectual gad- 
abouts. They want to be amused with some 
phase of the spectacular. A good book an 
hour a day will in twenty years lift her or him 
who reads it to the morning plane of vision and 
enjoyment. Whoever says that the bulk of peo- 
ple are shut off from social and intellectual life 
by labor, simply does not know. Some are — say 
many are, but the many are not. Railroad men, 
all manufacturing employees, packing-house 
men, the great bulk of clerks, farmers, machin- 
ists, have time, and to spare. Men are ignorant 
because they loaf and tell stories better unsaid 
and better unheard. Young men in a city do 
not lounge around saloons because they are so 
wearied they can not think, nor yet because there 
is no place open for them to spend their unem- 
ployed hours, but because they love darkness 
rather than light, or, to put it more mildly, be- 
cause they love questionable places and ques- 
tionable society above places and society which 
are beyond reproof. The libraries and other 
appurtenances of modern Christian civilization 
are at their disposal. If they are ignorant and 



Christianity as Day-Laborer 115 

empty-headed, the fault is not their drudgery of 
toil, but the inanity of their desire. 

Some people are unquestionably worked too 
long and too hard. The sweating system is to 
be condemned and never condoned, and to its 
abolition philanthropists must direct the atten- 
tion of legislation with unabated zeal. It can 
be, and must be abolished. Christianity stands 
for individual work, for everybody working, for 
free opportunity for labor, for economical use 
of moneys earned, for a just division between 
capital and labor; but stands for capital as a 
chance for labor and a result of labor, for justice 
on the part of the employer to the employee, 
and for justice on the part of the employee to 
the employer; stands for a competent worker 
and a considerate employer; stands in the field 
of labor for abolition of that heirloom term, 
''servant" and "master," substituting in their 
stead employed and employer. And to those 
who study this matter it must be a subject of 
sincere gratification to note how these better- 
ing conditions and bettering nomenclatures are 
prevailing, and how seldom in America we hear 



1 1 6 The Blessed Life 

talk of *'my servants/' Americans, in the main, 
know better than to talk after this fashion. The 
coachman is as much a man of politics as his 
employer, and only in his regalia is he a hired 
man. When he gets his street clothes on he is 
a citizen. In a republic you can not permanently 
foist these terms of subordination on anybody. 
The air is against it. Liberty will not tolerate it. 
The gains for labor must, in the main, come 
from within labor. No nationalism can exalt or 
employ labor permanently, as I have tried to 
show in my brochure on ''A Study of Current 
Social Theories." Christian individualism is the 
only explanation and destination, because that 
only is congruous with man's nature, with his 
freedom and the just scope of government, 
whose office is to serve rather than control. The 
redemption of the soul and body comes not from 
soap, but from grace, though soap becomes a 
means of grace for a redeemed body. Chris- 
tianity is a day-laborer, and joins with the Christ, 
the great philanthropist, in lifting the laborer 
out of the ranks of machinery into the ranks of 
manhood. 



A WORK SONG 



William A. Quayle. 




Selvin. 



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s 



the fight se-vere, 
a busi-ness here 
as I may be 
complaint I bring 



-/&- 



^2^ 



Eg 









The shock of battle great; 
In this big world and fair : 
A help - er to the earth, 
Of toil, • or per - il dark. 



t^ 



r ^n^ 



g 



i — h 






But I have Christ for-ev-er near, To help me soon and late ; 
It I pur-sue with ho-ly cheer, A-lert to do my share; 
So long as I may work with Thee, My work shall be my mirth ; 
But at my work ex - ult-ing sing, Like high priest at God's ark ; 



Til-tt-^-rt=* 






* I 1 



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S 



-M fS fS 



^m 



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f±^ 



^ ^t t m z Mm 



■<&- 



But I have Christ forev-er near. To help me soon and late. 
It I pur-sue with holy cheer, A-lert to do my share. 
So long as I may work with Thee, My work shall be my mirth. 
But at my work ex-ult-ing sing, Like high priest at God's ark. 







"^trr ' i- . 



S 



A PERSONAL PRAYER 

WE thank Thee, Heavenly Master^ that Thou didst say in our 
hearings ** / must work the zvork of Him that sent me, ' and again 
Thou didst say, **/ must work to-day and to-7iiorrow and the day 
following.''^ It were a shame for us to be idle when Thou wast 
day-laborer. We are glad for something to do and a heart to do it. , 
We bless Thee for hands that are virile, prehensile, acco77imodative 
to every phase of toil; that they can grasp the hoe or the sword or 
the plow, or the ship'' s helm, or the boaf s prow to drag it on the shore 
when the voyage is done, or from, the beach back into the sea once 
more, or that can finger the lute with the dim suggestions of music 
even when silent, and the fisher'' s net or the hammer or the pe7i or 
artist^ s brush, or the scythe or the cradle which needs rocking while 
our lips are singing, or the dishes for setting the supper- table where 
the lamps are lit and the laugh goes round, or to hold the limp hand 
of weary weakness or the Book of God for reading — we bless thee 
for such multi-laboring hands. We are God'' s born manufacturers, 
and his design is that there should be not one lazy man or woman 
among us all. So may we not frustrate the grace of God. 

Make us honest workers, eager to do a good deal before the work- 
hours are over. Give us the skill of holy cunning and zest. May 
we love the smell of our own shavings, and rejoice hi the toil that 
makes our hands callous and the muscles of the ar7n vigorous. May 
the sun bronze our faces and love' s labor 77iake our hearts grow glad 
as if we were on a holiday ; and when otir tired hands fall a7id we 
can work no more, grant us to be a77iong that elect co/npany whose 
works do follow the77i. Receive our oblation i7i the 7ia77ie of God 
our Father, and Jesus our Redee77iery and the Holy SpiT^t our 
Comforter, A77ien, 



CHAPTER VII 

The Sanity of Christianity 

"We huve received the spirit of a. sound mind" 



PRAYER 

At mom the trumpet blew the call to arms; 

And I, a' soldier, sprang from bed of clay, 

Whereon aweary I did rest till day 

With trumpet blare did rouse to mad alarms 

Of conflict fierce as hell : Nor dreams with charms 

Of pictures sweet as heaven could me delay; 

I must for battle gird; yet with me stay 

Those dreams like bulwarks sheltering from harms. 

And such is prayer. Each day before I pass 

From my own privacy with God, I lay 

My life before His cross, believing all 

His Word hath taught me, which doth glass 

His beauty back to men. I kneel ; I pray : 

My prayer defends me till the shadows fall. 



In a recent issue of the Methodist Review is 
' an article of remarkable strength, written by- 
President Little, and entitled, ''The Place of 
Christ in Modern Thought," and in this article 
is the following phrase : ''The revival of religion 
with which our century began was therefore a 
return to sanity. It would have been another 
form of madness but for the reality and Divinity 
of the Lord of life and glory." This saying is 
profound, and worthy of attentive consideration. 
Christianity is sanity. Christ was essentially 
sane. I have always felt that. No person can 
read the Gospels and not feel that those who 
wrote them were sane. They are not rhapso- 
dists, nor are their writings rhapsodies, but rec- 
ollections given with such straightforwardness 
and manliness, and lack of wonder at the wonder- 
ful things they rehearsed, and freedom from ejac- 
ulation or emotion over miracles, which fairly 
stupefy the reason as we read them now. If any 
one will read the Gospels as he would read any 

121 



122 The Blessed Life 

other narrative, he will feel them true, and that 
the authors were balanced men. Jesus and Paul 
were accused of madness, but not because of how 
they acted, but because of what they said. The 
claims of Christ for himself, and Paul's claim for 
him, were the grounds for the accusation in 
both instances. Neither Jesus nor Paul acted 
insane; they always kept themselves in rein. En- 
thusiasm is necessary, laudable, desirable; but 
irrationality is not desirable. It always hurts 
Christianity. The simple enthusiast hurts what 
he would help. Christianity is so great a busi- 
ness fraught with such immortal interests, that 
its methods should be carefully studied and 
guarded. Extravagance is not wisdom. Just 
claims will get clientage. Excess receives de- 
risive laughter. Eagerness must not run into 
riot. Indifference is damaging; fanaticism is 
destruction. There is a middle ground; namely, 
the ground of Jesus and the evangelists, which 
found, seized, kept — ^will be in itself an apos- 
tolate of good. 

An inspiring advocacy is desirable. Such 
was John Quincy Adams's championship of the 
right of petition, constituting the initiative of 



The Sanity of Christianity 123 

the campaign against slavery in America, which 
ultimated in the freeing of slaves by Abraham 
Lincoln, and constitutes one of the briUiant 
chapters not only in a brilliant career, but in the 
history of wise, continuous, and manly antago- 
nism against existing wrong. Such an instance 
might well serve as pattern of attack upon in- 
trenched evil; but here is enthusiasm, not fanati- 
cism. Flee conventionality in religion, but flee 
religious lopsidedness also. "Walk worthy of 
the vocation wherewith ye are called," ''not as 
fools, but as wise," "that the gospel be not 
blamed," three separate Scriptures which dove- 
tail into each other, as if mortised for such use. 
The Christian is in "all things to be a pattern," 
and a fanatic is a pattern for nobody save as he 
is to be shunned. That discriminative saying of 
the Scriptures, "We have received the spirit of 
love and power and of a sound mind," is so sane 
and bold and wholesome as that we may safely 
hold to that. 

There are fatalities in thought as in life; and 
concessions may be made which can not be re- 
called. Thinking and conduct are alike beset 
with dangers; and an error in thought must log- 



124 T'h^ Blessed Life 

ically be followed by an error in conduct, a fact 
to which we give too little emphasis. We pro- 
ceed as if thought and act were distinct entities, 
whereas the two are inseparable. ''As a man 
thinketh in his heart so is he" is a truth invari- 
able in gravitation. Fallacious thinking will ul- 
timate in fallacious conduct; and it will be safe 
to assume in any instance of aberrant action 
that it has had antecedent of aberrant thought. 
Not all thought comes to this logical conclusion; 
but it is unsafe in the last degree to indulge in 
the hope that men may think as they will with- 
out detriment to their actions. This is allowed 
to be true in the domain of morals, but that it is 
equally true in the domain of non-ethical action 
seems not to be sufficiently considered. Heresy 
of thought can have but one result. Loose 
methods of reasoning will inevitably ultimate in 
loose methods of doing. 

The foregoing ideas spring naturally out of 
the topic under consideration. It has been in 
vogue in high quarters even to speak of ''cranks" 
in apologetic and sometimes in eulogistic terms. 
To hear a reformer referred to as a "crank" is 
not infrequent. The writer believes any such 



The Sanity of Christianity 125 

usage to be a fatal looseness in thought. Christ, 
we are told, would be considered a ''crank" in 
our time. I believe such statement to be un- 
qualifiedly untrue. There was nothing mon- 
strous about Jesus. He impressed us as natural. 
"Balanced'' would seem a fitting word to ex- 
press that astonishing co-ordination of powers 
in Jesus. He never seemed outre, AVe feel as 
we read the brief biographies written by eye- 
witnesses or competent historians, that his con- 
duct was in striking harmony with the occasion, 
whatever that may have been; and to denomi- 
nate Christ a ''crank" is not simply an infelicity 
of speech, but an incongruity of thought, and 
betrays a disregard of the facts, for which there 
is no palliation. How frequently do we hear 
such a statement as this: "Cranks are necessary; 
I never knew a machine w^ithout a crank;" from 
which, of course, we are to infer "cranks" are 
a necessity. It amounts to this, no cause can 
get on without cranks; and every crank solaces 
his soul with this notion. He needs to remem- 
ber that many a crank is attached to no ma- 
chine, and a crank detached is a very useless 
bit of material. I am of those who think that 



126 The Blessed Life 

our loose thought and talk are, in part at least, 
responsible for the multitude of cranks with 
which Church and State are infested. 

The truth is, a crank is a man who lacks 
balance. He is either temporarily or continu- 
ously a monomaniac. He is as the Cyclops was 
fabled to be, the possessor of but one eye. Now, 
if we hold a crank to be what the foregoing 
definition affirms, people will not take so readily 
to calling themselves cranks, and a man would 
no more felicitate himself on being a crank than 
he would on being a maniac. 

A man is himself when he possesses all his 
powers in due co-ordination and subordination, 
as a machine is sound when every part acts in its 
appropriate sphere. And a man is best equipped 
for steady usefulness when he is most a man. In 
other words, that man is best fitted to influence 
others in any given direction who is recognized 
as a balanced man — not crotchety, but capable, 
candid, and of a sound mind. The writer's be- 
lief is that a crank is always a damage. The 
moment a soul loses balance it loses power. 
Lopsidedness is not strength. The beauty and 



The Sanity of Christianity i 27 

utility of the human body depend on the pro- 
portion in form and the balance of parts. A 
monstrous trunk with baby legs produces a 
monstrosity; but it will appear that people not 
a few mistake monstrosity for strength. Sandow 
is singularly well proportioned; and manhood 
to be useful to the full of its powers must be the 
same. 

There is little choice in cranks. With all of 
them it is a case of sailing between Scylla and 
Charybdis — falling into one, we devoutly wish 
it had been the other. Cranks may be divided 
into political, ecclesiastical, culturistic, and gen- 
eral. The sign on each is that of the mono- 
maniac — he has one topic. The doctor who 
threw all patients into fits, since he was death 
on fits, is the worthy progenitor of this entire 
ilk. With the crank, life's brevity seems so im- 
pressive that he must ventilate his one idea in- 
cessantly. He is a humbug, and his idea is likely 
to be a fake. 

So soon as you see a man is a crank, so 
soon has he lost all influence with you. You 
know, if you have sense, that he is disqualified 



128 The Blessed Life 

to pass an intelligent judgment on any question. 
He has cut himself off from a judicial frame of 
mind. He is as a wild buffalo charging at a 
red rag, having neither eye nor sense for any- 
thing else. The fact is, no one truth can pre- 
empt the world, nor ought it to pre-empt the 
mind; and the man who has allowed one notion 
to fill his thought has missed much of the dig- 
nity of life, as well as cut off the right arm of his 
own strength. 

In no instance in histor}^, so far as the writer 
has read, has anything been achieved by a man 
being a crank. True, men who were cranks 
have succeeded in doing notable things, but this 
was in spite of and not because of their cranki- 
ness. To adduce a prominent instance of the 
ultraism of crankism in genius, consider Wen- 
dell Phillips. No right-minded man will under- 
rate Phillips's genius for discovering moral is- 
sues, for terrible invective, for classic oratory, for 
indomitable purpose; but in so far as he became 
a crank he became shorn of strength. Lincoln, 
not Phillips, was the emancipator. Yet Phillips, 
seeing but the one issue, would have sidetracked 



The Sanity of Christianity 129 

all besides, and was one of the men who, when 
Lincoln had need of every loyal man's support, 
was lifting up a faulting voice against him, and 
even after the slave was freed, bolted the Repub- 
lican party because in 1864 it renominated Lin- 
coln, though that should have made no differ- 
ence. True, Phillips returned to the party before 
November; but the cruelty of the act and the 
folly of the procedure were none the less. Now, 
is it not apparent that Phillips's achievements 
were not the cause of, but in spite of, the cranki- 
ness? Every one-ideaed man is a social pest. 
''This one thing I do," said Paul; but the phrase 
IS not to be construed into a declaration of 
crankism; for Paul's versatility of thought and 
address to his Master's business is one of the 
phenomena of biography. 

The religious crank is a special aflfliction. It 
needs to be noted that a crank in a good matter 
is more insistent and harassing than any other. 
He anathematizes all who differ from him, and 
demands that what is uppermost in his thought 
shall be uppermost in everybody's thought; and 
if it is not so, those differing from him are con- 



130 The Blessed Life 

signed to the Gehenna of those who love not 
our Lord Jesus. 

In the writer's belief, no one thing needs to 
be more persistently taught our young Church 
men and women than that their usefulness in the 
Church and their service for the Christ depend 
in a marked measure on their balanced Chris- 
tian character and action. The Christian of all 
men should be he who has a right perspective; 
who sees all truths in their right relations; who, 
putting God first, gives to all subordinate facts 
legitimate emphasis. Everything in its order is 
just and commendable. 

The conclusion is that cranks are never jus- 
tifiable, and we devoutly pray for the passing of 
the fanatic, and the reign of men of sound mind, 
heart, will, and conduct. 

Christianity is sanity of view and method, and 
the reason why it must and does prevail is be- 
cause it has no omissions nor abnormalities. A 
great, sane Christ, with a wide, sane plan for 
recovering the world to God — this is the gospel. 
The plan for raising Cervera's fleet is probably 
doomed to failure; not so Christ's redemptive 
plan. He is raising the sunken fleet of this 



The Sanity of Christianity 131 

world. There is no sign other than of discrim- 
inative process in all the gospel system, and so 
Christianity appeals to man at his saner mo- 
ments, when he comes to himself, as the prodigal 
son is said to have done. Christ and Chris- 
tianity are safe leaders because they are sane 
leaders. 



A PRAYER 

LORD^ in Thy Word we are told that if any man lack wisdom^ 
let him ask of God. We would hold fast to that suggestion. Our 
lack oppresses us like a great weight. The spirit of a sound m,ind 
is a gift we need. Grant us that m^ercy. Make us to be on daily 
guard against the marauding instinct which clamors and swaggers 
in words and ways, that runs riot like a stream, in flood-time. 
Show us that in our restraint is evidenced our fidelity to God, and 
that fe-rvency of spirit is evidenced no less by consideration than by 
vociferation. May we weigh our thoughts and words and goings 
so that in nothing the gospel shall be blamed ! May we be enthu' 
siasts but not madmen ! May we love Thee with a passion strong 
as strength, and serve Thee with a delicacy like the fine instinct 
of womanhood ! May we forward God^ s cause and not retard it, 
assist all measures which lift life Godward, persist in every cabn 
and manly quality of mind and heart, to the end that through us 
the coming of Thy kingdom m.ay be hastened and the coronation 
day of Jesus the Son of God may run toward us with swifter steps ! 
Help usy for to help ourselves seems far from us* Atnen. 



CHAPTER VIII 

Christianity and Thought-Life 



*But Maty kept all these things and pondered them in her 

heart '' 
*Whatsoe<ver things are pure, think on these things ". 



DEFEAT 

I plucked a feather from an eaglets wing, 
And thought to write a song of epic might, 
Whose deep-toned music should men's dreams excite 
And plaudits — which as seas should swing 
In ever-widening billows, and should ring 
Like living laughter that would change the night 
And silence into joy and grace and light, 
And make its glooms and solitudes to sing. 
1 wrote — and no one read my poem through. 
And then I found a feather from a mourning dove, 
Dropped from its wing in flying through a wood. 
And wrote a psalm of pain and pity, true 
To life, and tender with immortal love; 
And weary hearts both read and understood. 



THOUGHT IS that exercise of the human 
mind whereby man, stationary in a dot 
among the stars, a citizen of the earth, becomes 
a traveler through and at home in the boundless 
universe. No one has explained the mystery 
of thought, nor need attempt the task, seeing 
it is ''hid from the eyes of the wise and prudent'' 
as wisdom is. That section of the drama of Job 
devoted to the asserting of the inability of man 
to locate wisdom might stand instead for a de- 
scription of man's failure to locate thought. 
Descartes's philosophical apothegm was, ''I 
think, therefore I am," making thought the first 
step — a point of departure for his discovery of 
the soul. We think, and our thought is a real- 
ity more sure than avalanche or mountain. We 
feel our lives resonant to the thoughts of elect 
thinkers, as if our souls were stringed instru- 
ments; and after all our responsiveness to 
thought, and rare delight in it, we can not even 

guess what thought is ! Surely, we are ''fearfully 

135 



136 The Blessed Life 

and wonderfully made/' To thought, Chris- 
tianity makes appeal — an appeal strenuous and 
continuous. Offering our bodies a living sacri- 
fice to God is said by Paul to be ''our logical 
service" — a happy phrase, and truthful. Logic 
is the appeal to reason; Christianity is the ap- 
peal to reason. It asks faith truly, but faith 
on evidence, and not without. Luke's Gospel 
and his Book of Acts are the testimony of eye- 
witnesses. Nothing was set down on hearsay 
or imagination, but was inquired into accord- 
ing to the most rigid methods of testimony then 
current; and history was a science among the 
Greeks. Luke was a physician. You can see 
this in his writings. How his craft puts its ear- 
marks on him in his writing ! A physician trusts 
to his eyes. He diagnoses. He is rigid, his 
tendency being to materialism rather than to 
idealism. This bias is one of the practitioner's 
dangers. But in a historian of the life of Jesus, 
and the initial spread of Christianity, this bias 
was of incalculable service. Luke does not af- 
fect to have seen the Christ. He certainly was 
no apostle. At what point in his career he 
crossed the path of the gospel nobody knows; 



Christianity and Thought-Life 137 

for Luke is as invisible in his writing as 
Boswell in his writings of Johnson. Luke 
is not the theme. The gospel is the theme, 
and Christ the heart and life of that gospel. 
But Luke is Paul's family physician. He was 
critical. You mistake him if you assume he 
is agape with curiosity and credulity. He 
is calm and grave, judging symptoms, tak- 
ing, as it were, the gospel's pulse and tempera- 
ture. Luke is no crude, credulous writer. He 
gives the established facts of a supernatural in- 
vasion called the gospel, and he turns a search- 
light on the face of Jesus. He lived in those 
day when all facts could be established; when 
the guards that stood at Jesus' grave, and the 
centurion who commanded at his crucifixion, 
and the quaternion of soldiers who threw dice 
for the possession of his seamless garments, 
when the disciples and their antagonists, were 
living, active, accessible. On such evidence faith 
is appealed to in this supernatural Christianity. 
The direct appeal of Christianity, then, is to the 
rational; let no one think otherwise. 

And, besides, Jesus' method was the method 
of stimulating thought. His appeal was to the 



138 The Blessed Life 

head as to the heart. Our immediate thought 
concerning Jesus' sayings would be, ''Surely, 
Jesus will make his audience understand him, 
and will, in consequence, speak with utter- 
ance easy to be understood/' In him we had 
anticipated lucidity of thought and style. Here, 
if anywhere, we ought to find certain trans- 
parency in statement. I have rowed on streams 
of such delightful clearness that the flints which 
paved the bottom, and the seams in the rocky 
floor, and the fish darting like arrows shot from 
some invisible bow, all were visible. You saw 
through water as you saw through air; and such 
lucidity of style we had anticipated in Jesus' say- 
ings. Clearness is a virtue in writer or speaker. 
Words are for importation of ideas — the com- 
munication of thought. And we are sometimes 
told to use the simplest words, which is a bit of 
blundering advice, seeing what we are in honor 
bound to do is to use the best words. Monosyl- 
lables are not of necessity easier to understand 
than polysyllables. Paul enjoins speaking in a 
known tongue, and forbids speaking in an un- 
known tongue. But style ought to fit the thought, 
and vary according to the theme. The chief sin 



Christianity and Thought-Life 139 

of Pope's style was that he had one method for 
saying everything. Soldier and court favorite, 
Hector and him who wrought the '*Rape of 
the Lock," to each he gives the same voice. 
The snip of scissors and the crash of spears can 
not be pictured by the same words. Sometimes 
style may be quiet, like the current of waters 
on level lands; sometimes wild as the rush of 
tempests. The highest style illumes the theme 
by its very movement. But we may still insist 
that speech be luminous and limpid, but let it 
compel us; let us be borne as if some giant 
seized us in the dark, and ran away, bearing us 
on his shoulders. 

And Jesus — speaking to common people, 
who ''heard him gladly," as we are told — will 
speak plainly, will reduce the understanding of 
him to a minimum of effort, will make slight 
draft on the intelligence of his auditors. So we 
argue. But our supposition is a mistake. No 
one ever demanded more from his hearers. 
He claimed a closeness of attention which no 
one of the apostles approximated. He spoke, 
and even his disciples could not comprehend 
him. His were dark sayings. Christ spoke in 



140 The Blessed Life 

parables, with the intent to make men think. 
We mistake this matter. Christ was not so 
eager to be understood as he was eager to make 
men thinkers. And here lies the art of the 
hid meaning. It is stimulative. The physician 
gives strychnia to tone up heart action, arguing 
that the system needs an immediate quickening 
of enginery, and so he sets the heart to working 
harder. Christ in like manner gives a thought 
stimulant. Three things Jesus was concerned 
to do : To teach us to think, to teach us to love, 
to teach us to live. And Christ knew what some 
people do not appear to know; namely, that a 
degree of clear thinking is essential to loving 
and living. You can not take life to pieces as 
you can a clock. Life is a whole. You can kill 
a man in many ways — by stabbing him at the 
heart, or crushing his skull, or cutting his jug- 
ular; for life is a whole, and man's soul ma- 
chinery is a unit. You may take a watch apart, 
pile its wheels and springs and jewels together, 
and put them back, and the watch runs. Not 
so with man's soul. It is indivisible. All the 
machinery of life is brought into play at all 
times; sometimes, truly, an emphasis is placed 



Christianity and Thought-Life 141 

upon certain parts, but all parts work. A loco- 
motive is continually pumping water, though 
when the engine defies distance and gravitation, 
and outspeeds the tornado, you do not notice 
this pumping process. Life's machinery is a 
unit, and has solidarity. The man who lives 
must love and think. The man who loves must 
think. A degree of thought is essential to love. 
Man is possible lover and possible thinker. The 
soul has this capacity, and capacity is all there 
is until the soul becomes operative. 

Christ was cpncerned supremely to make men 
think, and here is the key to his parabolic ut- 
terances. To make people think, you must get 
attention; and, indeed, to make children think 
is education. Not to think for scholars, but 
to make scholars think for themselves, that is 
education. Teaching is not piling facts into the 
mind like bales of cotton, though this is a part 
of education, but to help the child to think. 
We are to learn where things are and what 
things are, in order to make knowledge avail- 
able. And Christ designed to make us avail 
ourselves of our supplies; and thinking may be 
defined as utilizing the stores of the soul. Christ 



142 The Blessed Life 

was a peerless teacher, Socrates in the market, 
and Plato walking about the Academe, or Jow- 
ett taking long excursions with his pupils, or 
Agassiz inspiring those who were his scholars, 
or Mark Hopkins, with his unique power of im- 
parting truth and enthusiasm — what teachers 
these were ! But what were these teachers com- 
pared with Christ? He set men to thinking as 
none of them did or could. And Christ's 
method of stimulating men to thought was 
speaking in parables. He was courteous always. 
He did not goad men to thought as Socrates 
did; for Socrates was a philosopher, but not a 
gentleman. Christ was philosopher and gen- 
tleman, and knew how to make men easy in his 
presence, which is the highest test of culture. 
He who knows how to make people feel at home 
with him is a, cultured gentleman. To make 
folks feel at home in your company is a fine 
art. So Jesus used the courteous but the 
pungent method of parable. He told men 
things hard to understand to make them think. 
They went away from his preaching wondering 
what was it he meant. He told them such hard 



Christianity and Thought-Life 143 

things that the disciples themselves could not 
understand them, much less could the people. 
But he drove them to attention and remem- 
brance and thought. The disciples asked him 
his meaning. Jesus understood the art of mak- 
ing his sayings remembered. Whenever words 
hold hke an arrow knit in the flesh with its barb, 
that is greatness. And, besides, parable is God's 
method in nature. He does not tell us how he 
does, but simply does; and we wonder why, 
and become philosophers and thinkers. 

Jesus spoke in parables. He was, in other 
words, a poet. All things appeal to him in 
figures. Shakespeare was packed with simile, 
trope, metaphor. He is enamored of simili- 
tudes. Jesus was the same, only larger and 
Divine. The universe is related; therefore some 
things are like other things. Some subtle point 
of union and communication exists between 
things, if we can hit upon the point. Jesus saw 
things, and as he saw them so he told them. He 
said, "I am the vine;" and men have studied that 
profound saying for nineteen hundred years, and 
have not exhausted it yet, and indeed can not 



144 The Blessed Life 

exhaust that pregnant suggestion. In a word, 
we may see from Jesus' methods how large a 
store is set on thought. 

And in order to thought, Christianity fosters 
silence, which means self-communion, thought- 
fulness, and apartness. One fairly feels the quiet 
in the Scriptures' brief description, ''And Isaac 
went out to meditate in the field at eventide." 
Silence and aloneness are good for the soul. 
Mary, we are told, hid the miraculous circum- 
stances connected with the birth of Jesus in her 
heart. She was meditative. She pondered over 
the amazing things through which her life had 
passed. And meditation is made much of in 
the gospel. "Examine your own selves" is the 
apostolic injunction, which clearly means, Think, 
ponder on thine own life. 

Jesus was and is the pattern in the gospel as 
he is its vital force and creator. He was a busy 
man. Labor and he were always neighborly. 
His face had a tired look upon it always. Busy 
folks are apt to substitute action for thinking, 
as if life were not commodious enough for both. 
There may not be room at the inn where Christ 
may be born, but there is room in the soul for 



Christianity and Thought-Life 145 

meditation and achievement. The meditations 
of Thomas a Kempis are quite possible for a 
man who is not a recluse. Amiel mi^ht have 
been a man of eager activities and redundant 
labor, and still have written his Journal. Sir 
Walter Scott, one of the busiest of all history's 
busy men, found room in his busy life for an 
elaborate journal, which only stopped when his 
pen trailed across the journal's page like the 
tip of a bird's broken wing, as he wrote his last 
words, ''On the next morning — ," and with a 
sentence just begun his hand tires so that he 
writes no more. John Quincy Adams, one of 
the most versatile and brainy American states- 
men, found time to compose an ample diary: 
from which facts I infer there is time in the 
busiest man's busy life for meditation. This 
dreamy mood is a necessity to a great soul's 
growth, as quiet often comes after the turbu- 
lence of tempest. Jesus was busy. He was 
''thronged." He turned nobody away. He had 
time enough to do the work needing doing. 
But he must have quiet; therefore he haunted 
mountains and nights and the sea. How he 

loved to linger by the Sea of Galilee! How 
10 



146 The Blessed Life 

often we find him on the mountains alone at 
night! And, besides this, his eighteen years of 
quiet Hfe in Nazareth, where, up to the age of 
thirty he Hved, made him master in thought. 
You can not doubt this, for his doctrine was 
shaped when he first told it to us. He did not 
tell it all, but he knew it all. The Galilean days 
were Christ's great nodal days. There he came 
to himself and his mission. How Jesus came 
to self-understanding and perceived his mission 
is one of the fascinating problems of psychology 
and Christianity. Whether the knowledge came 
to him when for the first time he stood and saw 
the golden roof and glittering spires of the Tem- 
ple at Jerusalem we can not tell, but certain 
it is that when he came to the temptation in 
the wilderness the devil thrust sore at him, and 
said, ''If thou be the Son of God," and this to 
make a wild struggle in his soul; but Jesus threw 
him off as you would throw off wolves from 
your throat, when, mad with hunger, on the 
Siberian steppes in the winter, they attempt to 
seize your flesh for meat and blood for drink. 
And certain it is that at the Last Supper that sig- 
nificant phrase was uttered, which we can never 



Christianity and Thought-Life 147 

make enough of, seeing it shows the fixedness 
of his character and self-knowledge. *'Jesus, 
knowing that he came forth from the Father, and 
must return to the Father,'' is the Scripture say- 
ing which shows that his faith in himself and his 
ministry was now solid like the rooted moun- 
tains. Jesus was not a splintered mast, tossed 
about by the incessant waves. He was rooted 
rather as the cedars, and this rooting was in his 
thought-life; and the long years when he was 
hidden from us in eclipse, these were to him 
what the spring is to harvests. He thought. A 
matchless grace sat on his lips; but a matchless 
grace also sat in his thought. 

Thought-life is the cure for superficiality; 
and superficiality is the death-thrust to great- 
ness of deed and spirit. The depth of Chris- 
tianity impresses me as the depth of the sea 
does, and the height of the sky can be measured 
more readily than the altitude of the Christ- 
thought, experience, and operation, in his days 
and through history. A profound thought is 
not only consonant with Christianity, but essen- 
tial to it. To love the most we must have an 
abiding thought. Milton was exhaustless be- 



148 The Blessed Life 

cause his thought had steady quiet. He spoke, 
sung, shouted in battle-tone, but his might grew 
on him in silence. Christ-haunting solitudes is 
suggestive. There is a pregnant suggestion in 
this. Some people clatter like empty wagons 
in their religious service and expression, and 
this because they have not "studied to be quiet," 
a saying which, while not meaning this type of 
quiet, may well allow to have that interpreta- 
tion put upon it. The wise wait for a mighty, 
moving spirit in silence in God's House, in the 
House of Prayer. Introspection is depth-giv- 
ing. We ought, as Christians, to study religious 
health, and for such should be somewhat alone. 
There is much in the spirit of mysticism, because 
mysticism is a part of the Christ system. Read 
from Tennyson's ''The Mystic:" 

"Always there stood before him, night and day, 
Of wayward, vari-colored circumstance 
The imperishable presences serene, 
Colossal, without form, or sense, or sound, 
Dim shadows but unwaning presences 
Four-faced to four corners of the sky: 
And yet again, three shadows, fronting']one, 
One forward, one respectant, three but one : 
And yet again, again and evermore. 
For the two first were not, but only seemed, 



Christianity and Thought-Life 149 

One shadow in the midst of a great light, 

One reflex from eternity on time, 

One mighty countenance of perfect calm, 

Awful with most invariable eyes. 

For him the silent congregated hours. 

Daughters of Time, divinely tall, beneath 

Severe and youthfnl brows, with shining eyes 

Smiling a godlike smile (the innocent light 

Of earliest youth pierced through and through with all 

Keen knowledges of low-embowed eld), 

Upheld, and ever hold aloft the cloud 

Which droops low-hung on either gate of life, 

Both birth and death : he in the center fixt. 

Saw far on each side through the grated gates 

Most pale and clear and lovely distances. 

He often lying broad awake, and yet 

Remaining from the body, and apart 

In intellect and power and will, hath heard 

Time flowing in the middle of the night. 

And all things creeping to a day of doom.'* 



Our mistake is to suppose action is every- 
thing. One reason why private prayer is so 
stimulative is that it sets the soul out from the 
highway like the weary traveler going from the 
road to the cooling shades to bare his brow to 
the soft wind's touch, and to lay his staflf of 
pilgrimage aside and rest. Christ's minute reg- 
ulations on this element of quiet are not unpre- 



150 The Blessed Life 

meditated. He knew at what fountains his own 
spirit had drunk, and commends them; and so 
says, "When thou prayest, go into thy closet, 
and when thou hast shut the door, there make 
thy prayer.'' 

Dr. William V. Kelley, in a beautiful essay, 
entitled "The Fable of ^tna,'' says, among 
other gracious and helpful things, "Life lacks 
not so much breadth as height;'' and the way 
to have height is to spend time in solitude of 
thought. And it was while John sat solitary on 
Sunday, thinking of the gospel, in meditation, 
love, and prayer, and so swept out of God, 
that God swept the Eternal City into John's 
soul with moving and majestic power before 
his eyes, which are ensamples unto us, on whom 
the ends of the world are come, that we are 
to be closeted with the gospel and its solitudes. 
We come upon God's fullness in the quiet of the 
most holy place. 

**0 weary Hands that all the day 
Were set to labor hard and long, 
Now softly fall the shadows gray, 
The bells are rung for even song ; 



Christianity and Thought-Life 1 5 1 

An hour ago the golden sun 

Sank slowly down into the west; 
Poor, weary Hands, your toil is done; 

' T is time for rest ! — ' t is time for rest ! 

O weary Feet! that many a mile 

Have trudged along a stony way. 
At last ye reach the trysting stile; 

No longer fear to go astray. 
The gently-bending, rustling trees 

Rock the youg birds within the nest, 
And softly sings the quiet breeze, 

*'Tis time for rest! — 'tis time for rest!' 

O weary Eyes ! from which the tears 

Fell many a time like thunder rain — 
O weary Heart! that through the years 

Beat with such bitter, restless pain. 
To-night forget the stormy strife. 

And know what Heaven shall send is best; 
Lay down the tangled web of life ; 

'Tis time for rest! — 'tis time for rest! 

Soul, go apart and rest a little. Peradven- 
ture, while thou waitest, God shall come and 
sit beside thee, and take thine hands, and let 
thee into his secret! 



A PRAYER 

PRECIOUS Christy we have read how that to those that believe 
TTiou art precious ; and, besides, we ourselves know it by gracious per- 
sonal experience, and in consequence rejoice with joy unspeakable 
and full of glory. Thou art our joy and our song. Thou makest 
MS to run unwearied and to walk with never a thought of faintness, 
and at holy intervals we mount up on wings as eagles. Thou fillest 
our mouth with laughter. Thou anointest our head with oil, our cup 
runneth over. Thou art the Man that died for me ; Thy precious 
blood is certified to cleanse ?ny sin. Thou wast alive and Thou wast 
dead — and now, bttt now Thou art alive for evermore and makest 
prayer for m^e. It passes knowledge, this wide love of thine. 

Precious? Yea, lord. Thou art precious, so precious as that to 
die is gain, to be with Thee and to live is triumph, if by our life we 
may enhance a little Thy splendid triumph over sin. Thou art 
precious to our hope and to our faith and to our hunger and to our 
devotion. What time we pray Thoit art father love, mother love, 
brother love, wife love^ husband love, and love of friend and little 
child. Thou art all loves fused together into one holy affection. 
Thou a7't lovCy seeing Thou art God. For which cause we wor- 
ship thee, strong Son of God. Like Thomas, we would fall with 
voices thrilled with repentance and with tears, and cry, ^^ My 
Lord and my Godf ' We love Thee and would worship Thee and 
serve Thee with robust fidelity and unflagging devotion of attitude 
and action. Help us, precious Savior. May we never weary in 
doing well, but keep faith with man and God^ for the sake of 
Christ! Amen, 



CHAPTER IX 

The Aristocracy of Christianity 



'According as God hath dealt to evety man the measure of 
faith " 



GOD'S BETTER THINGS 

As ONE who holds a letter in his hand 

With seal unbroke, and looks away and dreams, 

Both near and far unseen, forgot, while streams 

White light on him and what he holds ; unplanned 

This strange neglect as heartache in a land 

Of spring, though what the letter holds he deems 

Of lesser worth and merit. Dreaming seems 

Diviner good under whose shade to stand. 

Thus I, who hold this earthly life a boon 

Worth living and worth loving too, do still 

Esteem it of less value than the vast 

Expected life on which I enter soon 

When earth's school-days are ended and the thrill 

Of pain and death and resurrection passed. 



THE Athenian Democracy was an Aristoc- 
racy, the theory of government being that 
the best (Aristoi) should control. With this 
meaning, aristocracy is a palatable word. The 
best in heart and thought are genuine aris- 
tocrats. But, unfortunately, aristocracy does 
not mean this, but usually means those who 
think they are best. All self-manufactured aris- 
tocrats are social heterodoxies. Aristocracy of 
blood is fallacious because it is well known that 
the so-called blue blood has been dastardly bad 
blood in its day. I recall having seen the pic- 
ture of a stately lady showing her guests the 
picture of her ancestors. There they flamed right 
royally upon the wall, with their ruflfs and dig- 
nity, and swords belted at their sides, and made 
old days of deeds and might seem near at hand; 
but at the side of this dame showing these pic- 
tured dignities was another picture showing a 
drunken revel, with men under the table in 

drunken stupor, others draining crystal p-oblets 

155 



156 The Blessed Life 

of rare wine, and breaking their fellow-guests' 
heads with empty tankards. That was a side 
of ancestry the fair dame did not show nor 
care to remember. But the picture is true to 
life. To have the blood of ancient lineage is 
not to constitute him in whose veins it flows 
a gentleman. No ancestry can create a legiti- 
mate aristocracy. All such claims are ludicrous. 
The records of any aristocracy are voluminous 
in history totally unsavory. Because a man 
landed with ''The Conqueror/' and with him 
played murderous vandal, is no cause why he 
should be highly esteemed. Aristocracy of fam- 
ily is superfluous. This is not to say that people 
should not have a laudable pride in worthy 
paternity. Hallam Tennyson ought to glory in 
his father, who was the founder of his house. 
But his father's glory was not that he was made 
a peer, but that he was poet laureate for English 
speech. Browning, without the peerage, lost 
nothing. These distinctions are of little merit. 
They trick a crowd, but can not deceive history. 
Blood thins. A great man monopolizes the 
strength of his family, and leaves small stamina 
to supply his descendants. History does not 



The Aristocracy of Christianity 157 

justify the logic of hereditary aristocracy. Then 
there is the aristocracy of riches, more tawdr}- 
and reasonless than the former. If a man amass 
his own fortune he has cause for a manly pride, 
if he amassed it honorably. But for a son of 
riches, a man who did nothing to build up the 
fortune he possesses, to take airs and strut and 
count himself great because of simple wealth — 
such a man excites derision among thoughtful 
folks. Such aristocracy is cheap and shabby. 

Then culture has its votaries, who clasp 
hands, form coteries, and afifect to be distin- 
guished. Culture itself is laudable and desira- 
ble. All should covet it. Many possess it. 
None monopolize it. That cultured people 
should enjoy cultured people is to be expected, 
and is not reprehensible. They are kindred 
souls. Like studies, aspirations, travel, tone of 
thought — all conspire to create amities which are 
healthy. But the moment there comes to be 
an aristocracy of culture, its beauty fails. Cul- 
ture is not an aristocracy. It shifts from men 
to men with kaleidoscopic alacrity. Modesty 
becomes culture as lengthening shadows be- 
come the evening. 



158 The Blessed Life 

Jewry had two distinct aristocracies; namely, 
that of lineage and that of culture. The geneal- 
ological tree kept the one alive; the scribes and 
priests the other. The learned despised the un- 
learned. The sons of royal David had often 
only a memory for their glory, as Joseph and 
Mary, but these had the mark of royalty more 
definite than from David's line. God loved 
them and they loved God, and their lives were 
pure and sweet and heavenly. Bible history is 
a history of new names. Moses left no son to 
take his task and carry it to completion. Moses' 
self only saw the Land of Promise. Joshua, 
not related to Moses, was a new leader, and 
when Joshua died he left no son to carry con- 
quests to absoluteness. Samuel's sons were re- 
ligious and historic recalcitrants, unworthy their 
father and unworthy their vocation. David was 
the greatest of his line until Jesus came. Great- 
ness is not transmittible — is what the Bible his- 
tory proclaims. How weak, then, to boast in 
ancestry which exhausted all its vigor and had 
none to let. 

God sees to it that all men have a chance, and 
no man or family monopolizes. Three aristoc- 



The Aristocracy of Christianity 159 

racies have been tried and failed. Is there an- 
other? Yes, God has an aristocracy, ''Accord- 
ing as God has dealt to every man the measure 
of faith." This is the credential of the new 
aristocracy. God's aristocracy is one of good- 
ness. Morality is the queenly grace in the sight 
of God. Ancestry, riches, culture — some of us 
could not enter these aristocracies, but we may 
all pass inside the parlor doors of God's aristoc- 
racy; for all may be good. 

When once God has told us things, deep 
things, we could not guess nor discover, they 
appear so simple we forget we did not always 
know them and wear them as our own truths, as 
a beauty might wear borrowed garments.' I think 
we never would have found out the seeming 
simple and transparent fact of the primacy 
of goodness. We were as those looking for a 
friend, but looking in the wrong direction and 
seeing him not, though he was close beside us. 
He came from another quarter of the world. 
We looked at kings and nobility, at riches with 
their afifluence, at learning, with its calm and re- 
pose, thinking here is the world's highest society; 
and in that direction I think we had been look- 



i6o The Blessed Life 

ing yet had not God given us a star to light a 
torch before the dwelhng-place of poverty, 
where goodness transformed the place into a 
house of royalty. 

Yes, goodness is the real aristocracy. All 
men are learning that by degrees. We come to 
great truths slowly, seeing them, indeed, but 
not feeling them. Their wonder encroaches on 
us, slowly seizing our souls, as an army seizes 
a hostile land by slow marches, by siege, and 
campaign and battle. ''He is a good man," we 
sometimes say in half-commiserative tone, while 
the angels shout that phrase as if they celebrated 
a king's birthday. Observe the question God 
raises in deciding whether you be plebeian or 
patrician. Not, who are your ancestors; not, 
what is your wealth; not, how cultured are you; 
but, how" much faith have you. The Syro- 
Phoenician woman will be as a king's daughter 
then. The woman who touched the hem of 
Christ's garment, saying in her heart, ''That will 
suffice and heal my infirmities," will be as of 
the royal line of David. People ourselves have 
known will be lofty and imposing figures in 
the triumphal procession of the day of God. 



The Aristocracy of Christianity i6i 

These aristocracies of faith, how they will shine 
above the stars until their light blinds us! I 
knew, years ago, a Swede woman, a stranger 
in a strange land, its language and its way alike 
foreign to her. She never wore to the house of 
God other than a calico gown, but she felt none 
the worse for that; nor was she the worse. 
There in God's house, her God's house, she sat 
with light unaccountable on her face. She 
caught only intermittently from the preacher 
a word she could understand, and then she 
looked a delight such as might shine in a 
woman's face when her husband came from the 
battle-fields, battle-scarred, but her living hus- 
band yet; and when she caught sight of the 
Scripture truth upon the preacher's lips she 
would shout "Glory!" and she looked "glory,'* 
too. Intellectually, I knew she wore calico, but 
actually, she always seemed to me to be clad 
in Tyrian purple, with a necklace of gems and 
wrought gold. You could not mistake her — 
she was the King's daughter in disguise. Some 
day, when a little more light than ordinary 
burnt in her heart and on her face, she will 

be transfigured and her garments become glis- 
II 



1 62 The Blessed Life 

tening white, as no fuller on earth could whiten 
them, and she will fall in line with the sons 
of God who wave palms and wear crowns, and 
cry "Holy, holy, holy!" 

The Christian of our day is the real aristo- 
crat. I hail this liberation of vision. The people 
God marks are not the people of wealth, nor of 
ancestry, but of goodness; and the world is fall- 
ing in line more than it thinks with this aris- 
tocracy of God. Recall the best fiction and 
poetry of your own day, and see the prevalence 
of moral worth. Unless a writer tells of some 
one who did nobly we are not helped. Writers 
do not now lead to the discovery that the hero 
or heroine was a lost scion of some noble house, 
but shows rather some deed of merit so lumi- 
nous and wholesome that it was fitted to lift the 
soul which wrought it into the spiritual knight- 
hood. Heroisms need no ancestry; they make 
ancestry. Who asks whether Hobson and 
those with him had blue blood? Nobody? No ! 
No soul was found so lost to greatness that he 
could ask so trivial a question. Their deed was 
worth all ancestries. On a day before the Uni- 
versity of Edinburgh, David Livingston appeared 



The Aristocracy of Christianity 163 

to receive his degree. The student custom was, 
on such occasions, to make the recipient pay 
tribute in that he must stand their ''guying" for 
a time. And this man came, bronzed, and one 
arm hanging Hfeless at his side, paralyzed by 
a lion's teeth — this man who had endured all 
for Christ stood up, and their jeers froze on 
their lips. They felt heroism stood before their 
eyes that day, and as he spoke, saying, '*I must 
go back to Africa to open up new regions for 
commerce, and putting down the slave-trade, 
and for preaching Christ," their silence broke 
into applause instead, and wild as the huzzas 
of a charging brigade. This man belonged to 
God's aristocracy. He sleeps in Westminster 
Abbey now, among princes, poets, premiers, 
kings — and he is not out of place. He belongs 
there. For in heaven he lives in the good fel- 
lowship of the sons of God. 

To this divine aristocracy all may belong. 
Goodness is our common possibility. In heaven 
all earthly distinctions die, nor leave even a 
yellow leaf of many of them. But goodness will 
live on in perpetual youthhood like a God. 

There is a graphic scene Jesus puts before 



164 The Blessed Life 

our eyes. The judgment, dreadful and impos- 
ing, blazes before us. The ages are there. No- 
body is missing. All there, and all fronting the 
throne where the Judge, Christ, sits. His feet 
are like fine brass in -a flame; his hair is white 
like wool; his eyes flash like flaming swords, and 
he calls, ''Come, ye blessed of my Father," and 
bids them enter the ranks of the aristocracy of 
God. They have been good and done good. 
That was all; that was enough; they were God's 
aristocrats, and with such, heaven is filled. May 
we be in that company! 



A HYMN OF BEING AND SERVING 



William A. Quayle. 



Jevvett. 



^^ ^jTlJ-^ f^ ^l^ 



1. My Christ, I own Thee King Of this, my lit - tie life; 

2. I urge my quest to God; Him whol-ly would I know; 

3. The help - ful hand I crave. The ea - ger lov - ing heart, 



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con - so - la - tion bring And qui - et all my strife, 
path my Sav - ior trod I would with glad-ness go. 
soul to help to save Ere 1 from life de - part. 



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Give 
I 

Haste 

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me Thy peace within, Thy deep, sweet peace of love : 
find His la - bor sweet, In - creas-ing sweet His Word ; 
Thou my lag-ging feet, Speak sternly, Heavenly Dove, 



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Let 

Make Thou my life re-plete With faith, with work, with love. 



me God's life be -gin. To fin - ish it 
fi^nd my joy complete, When I for serv - ice gird, 
life 



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A PRAYER 

L ORDy now are we the sons of God, Great things are happened 
to us. We thought ourselves impoverished^ like orphans of soldiers 
slain in fratricidal wary when lot we found us loved^ planned for, 
exaltedy brothers to princes, cladin purple, reigning among kings — we 
learn we are the King'' s sons and daughter s^ and our faces shine and 
our hearts grow glad. We are God^ s sons. That word entices us. 
We bless Thee for God our Father, We want no viore. We would 
not forget our high relationship. Keep us from being blemishes at 
Thy feast of charity. Keep us close to the compensating great God, 
Let Thy face shine morning into our eyes and hearts. Give us grace, 
plenty of it, for the day whose stress we meet. Inhabit our heart, O 
Holy Spirit, Flame on our hearf s altar and consume the sacrifice, 
thou Fire from heaven. Be in our life^ s courtesies like a kindly fire 
upon a homely hearth. We are not worthy. We have never been so 
dull as to estimate worthiness when once we have looked at Thee, but 
Thou art condescending, and our Christ has called us friends. So stay 
with us, enlighten our eyes lest we sleep the sleep of the dead. Breathe 
on our heavy eyelids so that we be not asleep when our t?'ansfigu7-a- 
tion bursts upon us, the ecstasy of the ages and the joy of life. 

Wake my memory lest I forget ^ lest I forget. Hear this prayer 
for the sake of Christ, Amen, 



CHAPTER X 

The Social Joy of Christianity 

"The jo^ of the Lord is your strength " 



THERE SHALL BE NO 
MORE DEATH 

As ONE who walks through solemn woods at night, 

When every star is blotted out with cloud, 

And storm winds moan with rising passion loud, 

Holds high above his head a torch to light 

The path he takes, not knowing how to fight 

The cursed blackness back except endowed 

With radiance from his torch of pine, — else bowed 

In darkness and defeat his manly might, — 

So I above the grave of my sweet dead 

Hold high this torch of God, to light the gloom 

And pour in sunshine, while with praising breath 

I track the footsteps of my loved one fled 

To God's dear land and fair beyond the tomb: 

And this my torch, << There shall be no more death!" 



LAUGHTER IS more native to man than 
* tears. We laugh odds more than we weep, 
though we do not think so because we save our 
tears in a tear-bottle, forsooth forgetting that 
this is needless, seeing God is bottling our tears 
and keeping them before him; and we count our 
griefs as a nun her beads, and our laughter we 
do not subject to enumeration. Would we did. 
Gladness ought to have a commemoration and 
encomium, being altogether worthy of both. 
Even the babe does more smiling than weeping, 
though its mother does not think so, so crowded 
is her love with quieting the wailing voice of 
the child. The poet says, ''The babe has no 
language but a cry;" but he has a visible 
speech, and that is laughter. 

Society, like life at its normal, has more joy 
than despair. Not many hearts break. 

"The day is cold, and dark, and dreary; 

It rains, and the wind is never weary; 

The vine still clings to the moldering wall, 
169 



I/O The Blessed Life 

But at every gust the dead leaves fall. 
And the day is dark and dreary. 

My life is cold, and dark, and dreary; 
It rains, and the wind is never weary; 
My thoughts still cling to the moldering past. 
But the hopes of youth fall thick in the blast. 
And the days are dark and dreary. 

Be still, sad heart, and cease repining; 
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining. 
Thy fate is the common fate of all, 
Into each life some rain must fall. 

Some days must be dark and dreary." 

These things are true, but limitedly true, for 
many days are as full of delight as a meadow 
in early spring is full of flowers. Upon the sea 
I have seen days dim and dark, and heard the 
moan of waters infinite. I have seen the great 
sky and the great sea draw near each other in 
rain and mist, and have heard the weird wind 
in the masts and moving past the sails in mid- 
ocean; all this, truly, yet this was not all our 
ocean voyage. I have seen days as fair as spring- 
time days in heaven, when fleets of w^hite clouds 
sailed slowly over the seas of heaven, drifting 
lazily, like ships half-calmed on tropic seas, 
their white sails half filled and their white hulls 



The Social Joy of Christianity 171 

lazily running against the blue ethereal sea, and 
have seen them go, an empty fleet to an un- 
known port, but fair as dreams of home to a 
traveler in a far, lonely land; and I have seen 
the vault of the sky so high that its arch smote 
against the gates of heaven swinging outward, 
and the air was balmy with the dear odors of 
the summer sea; and I have seen the slow waves 
run caressingly along the ship's side, and far 
away, anchored to sky or sea, we knew not 
which, were fleets of herring-boats, with nut- 
brown sails flapping idly or hanging limp like 
a banner after battle, and fleets of fishers' boats 
with snowy sails that ran daintily along the sea, 
like girlhood clad all in white, running across 
some meadow sown with violets; a crest of foam 
sometimes lighted on a blue billow in mimicry of 
tempests. The world made merry on the sea — 
this was as surely an ingredient of the voyage 
as the shock of storm-winds or the mad rush of 
angry waves in mood of tempest, or skies gray 
with pain and hopelessness. The voyage has 
both gray days and gold, but I am inclined to 
think the gold days will weigh the calendar 
down. Make much of joy. God does. Nature 



172 The Blessed Life 

does. Christians must, for Christianity does. 
Take holidays. Let business slip the leash. Be 
merry betimes with the birds. Let laughter 
be the wine you drink (drink that wine only). 
Have joy. 

What advice is this? Are Christians to be 
insane and worldly? Heathen Horace sang 
''Carpe diem" — enjoy the day. And is the ad- 
vice wrong because a heathen gave it? Do I 
quarrel because water crystal and frosty-cold 
spouts from a fountain off my own farm? Is 
nothing good save what speaks in the Bible? 
Have done. No. God's world is as full of God 
as God's books. Horace knew some truths as 
well as an apostle. He knew enjoyment was a 
health resort. Do not the Scriptures say, ''A 
merry heart doeth good like a medicine?" And 
is not the Scripture therein clasping hands 
with heathen Horace? Surely. Christianity has 
laughter that rings to heaven. Who has not 
sung — 

*'Joy to the world! the Lord is come; 
Let earth receive her King; 
Let every heart prepare him room, 
And Heaven and Nature sing." 



The Social Joy of Christianity 173 

And music has had its education in the sanctu- 
ary. The heathen did not know quite how to 
sing. It is Christianity that has tuned the heart 
and Hps to singing. Hymnology is the lordUest 
music ever composed. Joy runs to singing as 
the waters do. The Psalms sing themselves; 
and joy is in Christianity everywhere. ''Songs in 
the Night'' are part of the gospel's blessed ben- 
efit. Christianity has social joy, radiant and full. 
John Baptist was a Nazarite and haunted the 
barren wilderness of Judea. His was a prophet's 
ragged appearance and rugged thunder-speech. 
He dwelt away from men. His genius was not 
social. His food and character were essentially 
those of a recluse. He was not man, but 
prophet. When seeing him we said, ''A prophet 
is come." In him the human element was second- 
ary; the prophet element primary. Who of us 
is not so impressed with John? We honor him, 
but scarcely love him. He absolves us from 
love. He demands our veneration and admira- 
tion. He stands tall as a saint. He lives like a 
soldier on the march, frugal, heroic, alert, obe- 
dient, sleeping under the open sky, tentless, 



174 The Blessed Life 

wrapped in his martial mantle of camel's hair 
tightened at the loins with a leathern girdle, 
ready for a call to arms — that is John. That is 
not Jesus. John was the courier, the dusty run- 
ner, clamoring so that the hills and cities echo 
to his thundering, ''He comes, he comes, the 
King, make ready, make ready, the King 
comes V and Jesus is the King. 

In him the man is first. His manhood im- 
presses us serenely, but deeply. His prophet- 
hood and divinity dawn on us by littles as the 
day does, but his manhood stands clear and 
strong as a solitary habitation stands out from a 
wide field. ''The man Christ Jesus" we call him, 
and himself named himself "the Son of man." 
He is so human we love him at first sight as 
Elaine loved Lancelot. Christ seems neigh- 
borly. To be with him is good as to be with 
our mothers. His coming invites company. No 
wonder the supper in the upper chamber lasted 
long. Slight marvel if Mary sat at his feet and 
listened eager as a w^oman to a tale of love. 
Small wonder that Martha coveted to hear him 
rather than do household toil. He was a guest. 
John never went to feasts; Jesus always did. 



The Social Joy of Christianity 175 

They called him ^Vine-bibber" because he was 
known and sat at the table where guests were 
thick. The human Christ, with his manly love 
of friends, with its attendance of feasts and 
weddings, with its beautiful guesthood, with 
feast in his honor at Bethany in Simon the 
Leper's house, when Lazarus was there — these 
things drive us to Jesus and make us feel he was 
a man. Our social nature shines in him like an 
evening lamp lighting the room with its genial 
glow. 

We never ought to forget that Jesus' first 
miracle was at a wedding and for a wedding. 
Politeness spoke in that miracle of making wine. 
Thoughtfulness lifted up its hand to grow wine, 
not by vineyard and grape clusters, and through 
sunny days of a long summer time, but to press 
the cluster of the water-drops and squeeze out 
ruddy wine. The man Christ Jesus, guest, sym- 
pathetic with the host's embarrassment, does 
this. How exquisite his courtesy ! Jesus, bidden 
to the marriage, went, and a marriage is a sign 
of the social life of the world. A marriage is 
the world's best life in picture. Love, and joy, 
and hope, and promise — all are here. And 



176 The Blessed Life 

Christ was present. Its laughter and music 
grated not harshly on him. He was at home 
with it. Would we had seen him ! And he went 
not as a censor, but as a man. That social joy 
tuned his own heart to laughter. From my 
heart I rejoice that John told us Jesus was a 
wedding guest and a helper at a wedding feast; 
and so Jesus began his miracles in behalf of 
human and home joy. Let the morose and 
sullen and laughterless think on this and be 
dumb. We can not mistake Jesus' attitude to- 
ward social instincts. He was not apathetic, but 
hearty. He was confederate with our merry- 
making. Let no one think that because we see 
him weeping and note the tears and do not see 
him when laughter makes sunrise on his face 
and in his eyes — let no one think he knew not 
laughter. The human Christ felt friendly to joy. 
The old singers sang ''The joy of the Lord 
is your strength/' a word of much meaning. 
And we read of the disciples' return to Jeru- 
salem "with great joy;" and we quite believe the 
narrative is true. Love and hope and toil for 
God, a rich service for the world, and hearts 
cleansed from sin, and family relationships with 



The Social Joy of Christianity 177 

all they mean and are — what hinders Chris- 
tianity being glad? ''The New Testament/' 
says Henry Ward Beecher, ''is the book of joy," 
and it is so because Christianity is the life of 
joy. It has to-day and all to-morrows and may 
well rejoice. 

^'Blessed be God, even the Father of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, and 
the God of all comfort, who comforteth us in 
all our tribulation, that we may be able to com- 
fort them which are in any trouble, by the com- 
fort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of 
God." 

Christianity is at home in society. Its pure 
morals, its elevated thought, its wide scope of 
experience, its perfect humanness, make it ideal 
as a social factor. I have sat at many banquet 
tables, but have never known more pure, limpid 
delight than when with men and women who 
loved God with a consuming passion. A Chris- 
tian home is a place where every good thing 
blooms like flowers w^hen soils and sky are 
propitious. A stranger from another planet 
coming into a Christian's home might be freely 

pardoned if he mistook the place and called it 
12 



178 The Blessed Life 

heaven. A sweet singer of the medieval cen- 
turies singing of heaven, chants: 

**I know not, O I know not 
What social joys are there, 
What radiancy of glory, 

What joy beyond compare.'* 

The social instinct is dominant in heaven. 
Society at large is not to be shunned by lovers 
of God, but to be enjoyed, and to be considered 
as a field of influence for Jesus. Men are folks 
before they are Christians, and one of the cre- 
dentials of the Christian religion is that it has 
sane bearing on our human lives and living. We 
are more human because we are Christians. It 
fires our better selves. It makes dumb lips elo- 
quent, and blind eyes bright with light and sight. 
We become responsive and receptive. Chris- 
tianity tends to naturalness and consequent 
spontaneity. To read John Wesley's Journals, 
which, by-the-by, are among the unusual literary 
productions of literature, one is impressed that 
he was a manly man. I think his Journals will 
justify anybody's time in reading them, for he 
was a man open to many worlds. He read and 
pondered many books. His observations are 



The Social Joy of Christianity 179 

singularly sagacious. Brief words they are, but 
pungent, and he was master in the use of virile 
and nervous English. In him a generous man- 
hood wrote and spoke. He can never, therefore, 
become obsolete. The hero in him never 
covered up the man. The man was competent 
to contain heroism, as I have seen pools of water 
by a roadside hold half the heavens. Chris- 
tianity is delightfully normal in its social opera- 
tion, and enlarges all best things in their capacity 
of receptivity and enjoyment. 

The most beautiful courtesy, the strongest 
friendships, the most lavished generosity in gift 
and service, the rarest fidelity and sympathy, the 
suavest and sunniest temper, the cheeriest hu- 
mor, the surest faith in friendship, the warmest 
welcome I have ever known have been found in 
Christian men and women. Some Christians 
I have known were sweeter than the breath of 
roses in radiant June. 



A PRAYER 

WE praise TTiee for the joy of the Lord, and for the genuine 
laughter Thou hast put into our lives. We love and laugh because 
we live. Thou hast made rejoicing germane to our spirits, Paul 
saidj I joy and rejoice with you all ; and he was quite human in 
this laughing, singing mood. Give us the sunshine of spirit and 
countenance, such as are ours by right of our relationship to God. 
Keep us from moping along the journey as if we were God"* s 
invalids ; but may we the rather have the springing step and bound- 
ing heart which characterize and equip the soul whose life is hid 
with Christ in God! We would sing unto the Lord and make 
merry, for that we are His, and not life nor death nor any other 
creature can separate us froui the love of Christ which passeth 
knowledge. 

Make us redolent of hope and cheer and summer with its skies of 
blue and its fields of gold, and bring us along our way laughing as 
children who can not tell the reason of their laughter, only that 
they are glad. The joy of the Lord is our strength. 

We worship Thee as always through the Christ, Amen, 



CHAPTER XI 
The Centrality of God 

'For in Him tve live a.nd move and have our being ' 



LIGHT AT EVENTIDE 

If when daylight fades 

From my Hfe's sky, 
And dusky evening shades 

Droop low^ and lie 

As clouds at anchor, blest 

Am I, if far 
Or near, my eyes may rest 

On Christ, my Star. 

Then, glooms I v^^ill not chide 

Nor fear the night, 
Kno Vising at ** eventide 

It shall be light.'' 



A FASCINATING speculation of an old phi- 
losopher was that heaven lay at the geo- 
graphical center of the universe. The thought 
is happy and suits the soul. But whether true 
or not, this other thing is true, that God is the 
center of the spiritual universe. Swinging 
round him as planets about the sun, the spiritual 
movements run. God is a necessity of spirit. 
Without him the soul dies to its surest life. No 
system of philosophy can take the place of re- 
ligion, as history testifies, and because philoso- 
phy lacks God. Reason, proportion, esthetics, 
it may possess, but lacking God, it dies as cer- 
tainly as the leaf turns gold and brown, and 
drops from its summer home of beauty and 
music when vital saps refuse to run. Lacking 
nutriment, it dies. Reason lacks blood. Mo- 
rality is living, and in its veins is vital blood if 
God be there. Atheism is impossible if the 
world is to live and hope; and if God dies, hope 

dies on the same altar. Pessimism is the end of 

183 



1 84 The Blessed Life 

reason. God is the goal of hope, and its point of 
departure too. He is all. About him, from 
him, to him, all holy actions and devotions 
move, for ''Of him and by him and to him are 
all things," as says God's Word. And this is 
the saying of all literature and all life. Souls 
need God as earth needs the sun. What this 
world needs most is the unhindered sense of God. 
The permanent need of the physical world is the 
sun. The earth can grow gardens and forests; 
can create rivers and interior seas; can float 
oceans in its sky and break darkness into dawn 
if and because it has a sun. Without a sun the 
planet would be as a blind Milton, 

**Dark, dark, irrecoverably dark?" 

but with one, that has light for utility and 
beauty, clouds glow and burn out with no 
waste of light, filching not a ray from the fields 
of wheat and corn; there is enough glory and to 
spare. The world finds way along its lonely path 
because the sun shines and holds with sleepless 
power. This physical world owes all to this sun, 
but is not so much a debtor as the earth is to 
God. The world does not need the sun as the 



The Centrality of God 185 

world needs God. God is all the world has. He 
is light, heat, health, intelligence, inspiration, 
joy, salvation. Name his gifts, and you have 
catalogued human benefits. Dispossess the 
earth of its sun, and it will drift an iceberg 
through the spaces. Dispossess the world of 
God, and life is dead and hope glooms into an 
eternal night. Love dies if God dies. I re- 
peat, the world does not need the sun as the 
world needs God. 

Doubt kills because it eliminates God, and 
I am of the opinion that a study of the English 
doubt poets is pertinently instructive on this 
point. The doubt poets are Shelley, Byron, 
Keats, and Matthew Arnold. Shelley was a 
moral anarchist. Young, heady, brilliant, and 
standing in the presence of the Alps, whose sub- 
lime solitudes and altitudes should take conceit 
and atheism from both heart and lips, Shelley 
said, "There is no God." He was riotous against 
God, and declared him arbitrary in sovereignty 
and hateful in sway. "Prometheus Unbound" 
is Shelley's assertion of hate to God. Indeed, 
his works tell of nothing else. Read as a whole, 
they prove wearily reiterative of one assertion. 



1 86 The Blessed Life 

and that assertion is atheism in its varied forms. 
Shelley was social anarchist, and was in conse- 
quence, as most such are, a moral anarchist. 
He was against society and against God. He 
hated trammels and strove to break them from 
him. He was free lover in ethics and practice, 
and the history of his breaking his wife's heart 
and driving her to suicide constitutes one of the 
pathetic pages in the diabolism of doubt and 
atheism. Shelley was, he scarcely knew what, 
sometime seeming pantheist, but always cleav- 
ing to the no-God idea. He took his own no- 
tions for inspiration, beinq- egotistical to a de- 
gree which approximates fable. He is pantheist, 
or atheist, or nothingist, as his mind feels at the 
moment, but he is always against society and 
against God. Yet his was a brilliancy which 
glitters like starry night in high latitude. His 
gamut of performance was slight, but he im- 
presses the reader as a brilliant pianist does. 
We give more heed to the execution than to 
hearing the music. 

Byron was a corsair. He afifected misan- 
thropy till he became the thing he afifected. 
Now, misanthropy is a species of colossal 



The Centrality of God 187 

egotism; for who thinks the world hates him 
must possess a supreme estimate of himself to 
suppose that the world should engage to hate 
him. Don Juan may pass for a living Lord 
Byron. Byron was a moral anarchist. He hated 
society because he knew decent society con- 
demned him. All his poetry is of one type; 
either simple endurance or audacity. Of the 
former quality the ''Two Foscari/' and ''The 
Prisoner of Chillon" are illustrative; of the latter 
mood, gloomy, mysterious, rebellious "Childe 
Harold'' and "Lara" are representative; Childe 
Harold being Byron a wanderer and in his first 
stages of becoming a Giaour; and Lara being the 
last stages of Byron's settled misanthropy^ Don 
Juan is a rebel against decency and a devotee 
at Venus' shrine, who shocks morals and thinks 
himself a man of the world in so doing. Byron 
has a grievance and nurses it, and his self-com- 
miseration makes him to appear as a man with 
a real grievance, and therefore an object of pity 
to many; as he seems fighting his way through 
obstacles when he is in fact fighting to justify 
his unjustifiable indecency. Byron has strength, 
more the pity he did not use it better. Shelley 



1 88 The Blessed Life 

primarily fought religion; Byron primarily 
fought morality. 

Keats was simply negative in the religious 
attitude of his poetry. He was as Greek as if 
he had been born in Attica or Thebes in the 
days before Christ came. There is no tinge of 
Christian thought in his utterances. To be sure, 
his were a boy's utterances, but a boy of superb 
if hectic genius. But in ''Endymion" and 
''Hyperion'' is no more Christian attitude than 
in Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon," nor as 
much. Keats was simply oblivious to the Chris- 
tian system; or, in other words, a heathen in 
ethical attitude. By which is meant that he, be- 
fore Matthew Arnold had lived to ^ive the 
advice, had gone to Greece and not to Pales- 
tine as the home of ''sweetness and light." 
Shelley and Byron were hostile knights, who 
smote with hostile might at Christian society. 
Their breath was hot and their sword thirsty 
for blood. In them was nothing tempered, not 
even their sword. But they had the merit of a 
rude might and the dash of onset which was, in 
a fashion, electrical. 

The doubt poets came to their close in Mat- 



The Centrality of God 189 

thew Arnold. In him all the fire of the early 
onslaught is dead, only gray ashes being left. 
His doubt is not aggressive, but hopeless. In 
him is a sort of measureless sadness. For him 
Palestine holds a dream and not a man, much 
less a God; for him the tide of faith has ebbed, 
and in him doubt comes to its chaos and lone- 
liness and frigidity. His ''Empedocles on Etna'' 
is really a fable of his own doubt. Empedocles, 
driven by doubt, flings himself into Etna's crater. 
What a biography of doubt the poem is ! Doubt 
dries up the blood of creative art as a high 
wind dries up the pools along a plain. Matthew 
Arnold had grace and genius as a poet. High 
expectations were entertained of his ability, and 
justly so. His are verses sometimes as musical 
as Tennyson's. "Sohrab and Rustum" is so 
fraught with beauties as to be like a prairie 
in spring, lit with flowers and smoking with 
fragrance. But his doubt dried up the foun- 
tains of creation — dried them up utterly. 
And the loss was not his, but ours. There 
are those who profess to believe that by how 
much literature lost in Matthew Arnold's abdica- 
tion of poetry by so much literature gained in 



190 The Blessed Life 

his culturistic and religious essays. I have not the 
heart to concur. They may be right; my heart 
and my head say they are wrong. I have read 
all of his religious and critical essays, have given 
them honest and appreciative attention, and in 
all I have the mind to sob — for is this Matthew 
Arnold, our poet? Is this all that is left? What 
a vessel broke upon the beach that day when 
the poet turned prose writer; but it was his 
doubt did it. In him unbelief is nothing crea- 
tive, as some doubt might be thought to be. 
The old bravado of Byron and Shelley is gone. 
In Matthew Arnold was such longing and 
despair as was in Galliat's eyes when he sees 
the ship, bearing his heart's jo)^, move across 
the bay and over the rim of the sky, and his 
heart says, "All is gone, all is gone!'' Such 
loneliness seems to me to be on Matthew Arnold 
always. He has memory of his nobler faith; 
and memory is all he has. And Matthew Arnold 
is a subtracter. That is all he does. He is 
grave. Laughter and he seem to me to have 
parted company. He is as one who goes into 
a fight feeling himself going to his doom. This 



The Centrality of God 191 

is the goal of doubt. And doubt dries up the 
fountains of poetry. How bitter the taste doubt 
leaves on the palate, seeing this is so! God is 
creative. He is chief poet. He is the father of 
music, singing birds and singing trees, and 
streams in the fair hills, and waves upon the 
shore, and happy voices of men and women 
whispering of love or singing it. God is such, 
whether men know it or know it not. As the 
flower has its debt to soil and sun, so soul has 
its debt to God. Ignorance can not cancel 
debt — can not eliminate obligation. The sight 
of a lost inheritance is the pathos of Matthew 
Arnold; for he knew something of God's better 
things. He was not blind; or if blind, he had 
not been born blind. He knew what light was 
like, and how the landscape glowed when the 
sun lit it up. Hear him in ''East London:" 

"'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 

Smote on the squaUd streets of Bethnal Green, 
And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 
I met a preacher there I knew, and said, — 

* 111 and overworked, how fare you in this scene?' 

* Bravely !' said he ; * for I of late have been 



192 The Blessed Life 

Much cheered with thoughts of Christ, the living bread.' 

O human soul ! as long as thou canst so 
Set up a mark of everlasting light. 

Above the hovvrling senses' ebb and flow^, 

To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam, — 
Not virith lost toil thou laborest through the night ! 

Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.'* 

The doubt poets came to their doom in him. 
Inspiration vanished Hke a swift-flying bird is 
lost in the sky. They had lost God, and they 
had lost all; for the loss of God is the utter loss 
to the heart. 

Now, I deny that these are theological utter- 
ances. They are experience — human experi- 
ence. And these sayings are true — true as the 
pain that comes from the cut of a battle-sword. 
Lost faith is the loss beggaring all others. 
Frances Brown in the London Athenceum, wrote 
a poem on "Losses," which sums up the woe 
of doubt in such poet fashion as to make its in- 
sertion at this point an honest necessity: 

**Upon the white sea-sand 

There sat a pilgrim band. 
Telling the losses that their lives had known, 

While evening waned away 

From breezy cliff and bay. 
And the strong tides went out with weary moan. 



The Centrality of God 193 

One spake with quivering lip 

Of a fair, freighted ship, 
With all his household, to the deep gone down ; 

But one had wilder woe. 

For a fair face, long ago 
Lost in the darker depths of a great town. 

There were some mourned their youth 

With a most loving truth 
For its brave hopes and memories ever green ; 

And one upon the west 

Turned an eye that would not rest, 
For far-off hills, whereon its joy had been. 

Some talked of vanished gold. 

Some of proud honors told. 
Some spake of friends that were their trust no more; 

And one of a green grave 

Beside a foreign wave, 
That made him sit so lonely on the shore. 

But when their tales were done 
There spake among them one, 
A stranger, seeming from all sorrow free : 

* Sad losses have ye met. 
But mine is heavier yet. 

For a believing heart hath gone from me.' 

'Alas!' these pilgrims said, 

* For the living and the dead, 

For fortune's cruelty, for love's sure cross, 

For the wrecks of land and sea ! 

But, howe'er it came to thee, 
Thine, stranger, is life' s last and heaviest loss. ' ' ' 
13 



194 The Blessed Life 

Christianity is fitted to mankind as a palm- 
branch is fitted for a king's hand. The king 
was first. Christianity meets the heart's need, 
and was created to meet it. The heart was first. 
The heart wants God, as I think is a fair deduc- 
tion from all ruined temples and altars, as well 
as every cathedral that lifts its spires toward 
heaven; and wails of lost hope only witness to 
God. Lucretius and Heine and the English 
doubt poets do really affirm that God is a neces- 
sity of soul. His centrality is as absolutely 
necessary as the centrality of the heart in home 
and society or as the centrality of the fair sun 
is noon to the skies. You can not abandon God, 
as you can not safely abandon air. You may 
part company with air, but the parting is a part- 
ing of company with life. Part company with 
God, and you have severed friendship, not with 
religious dogma, as some suppose, but with the 
torch which kindles wood into the flame of light 
and warmth. A psalmist sings, 

** My heart and my flesh crieth out for the Hving God ;'* 

and the flesh and heart of the race cry out for 
this living God as did this singer of the olden 



The Centrality of God 195 

time. There is a race instinct, like the instinct 
of love. Christianity makes fast and dominant 
appeal to the soul because it makes God cen- 
tral; or, in other words, leaves him where he 
clearly belongs. 

This centrality of God is the assertion of the 
supernatural; a declaration not to be dealt with 
by Christians by stealth and in a gingerly way, 
in apologetical and deprecatory manner. Not 
so; but to be asserted with flashing eye and 
bounding heart, as a man asserts his love for the 
woman of his choice. Supernaturalism is Chris- 
tainity's chief glory. Morality has one world; 
Christianity has two worlds. One has magic 
near at hand and definite; the other has a magic 
that runs far back beyond that ''bourne from 
which no traveler returns.'' It is a custom with 
many persons, even professed Christians, to at- 
tempt to reduce the supernatural of Christianity 
to a minimum, as if thereby they should render 
their system more credible. All such attitude, 
to my mind, is wrong first, last, and always. 
Christianity's chief appeal to the soul that is hun- 
gry and thirsty after what it has not is that 
Christianity is a supernatural fact and force. 



196 The Blessed Life 

Our life is in Christ as we read, ''In him was 
life." Christianity is an importation. Men not 
a few seem bent on reducing the Christian sys- 
tem to a level of naturalism. They do every- 
thing to rob it of its wealth and power. Chris- 
tianity's glory is its supernaturalism. Christ 
brought it with him from heaven. The triumph 
of Christ is two worlds made in him. The gra- 
cious logic of the case is this : If Christ, a citizen 
of heaven, dwelt on earth, then can I, a citizen 
of earth, dwell in heaven. In Christ man is ac- 
climated to God, and becomes native to two 
worlds. Jesus was the miracle; Christianity is a 
miracle. If there is a God, and if that God is 
in Christ, these are the incredible facts; and after 
seeing that these incredible things are possibili- 
ties — nay, and actualities — all miracles become 
an easy reading. We are ''born not of blood, 
nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of 
man, but of God." Here lies our exceeding joy 
and our incalculable wealth. This is the great 
supernatural variety with which the Christian 
is familiar. 

God's centrality in the astronomy of the soul 



The Centrality of God 197 

of man is asserted in conscience, not as a Chris- 
tian dogma, but as a fact of universal experience. 
''GEdipus Tyrannus'' and ''CEdipus Coloneus'' 
are tragedies of conscience. So is ''Antigone;'' so 
is ''Faust;'' so is "Pippa Passes." So practically 
are all great dramas, whether written in prose or 
verse. And while conscience lives, God can not 
be obliterated from the world. He is in it by 
a loftier right than men are in it, and no force 
can drive him out. In Hugo's "By Order of 
the King" is an illustration of the impossibility 
of a wicked life ridding itself of God, which 
might well be read by all men everywhere. It 
is the story of the smugglers in their sinking 
ship. They had landed the little and mutilated 
lad, Gwynplaine, upon a stormy shore in the 
icy winter; lafided him, and left him to feel his 
way toward life or death as best he might. 
When the smugglers have put out to sea and 
the hurricane overtakes them, all resources fail, 
they despair of life, and then, when no hope 
lives, when death is absolute in its certainty, then 
the thing that confronts them one and all is 
their crime, and their solitary recourse was, in 



198 The Blessed Life 

the language of the doctor on board, "on your 
knees/' This is the assertion of conscience. This 
is also the assertion of the necessity of prayer. 
For a moment the criminal doctor on board this 
criminal ship rose to the dignity of the theolo- 
gian, for he said: ''Have mercy on yourselves. 
On your knees, I tell you. Repentance, that is 
the bark which is never submerged. You have 
no longer a compass? An error, you have 
prayer.'' So that this sinking of the smugglers 
on the lonely ocean is a parable of conscience 
and prayer. The ship is gradually sinking; their 
lives can be prolonged but for a little time at 
the farthermost, and with a kindled torch by his 
side, and with pen and inkstand in his hand, 
and with a parchment before him, and snow fall- 
ing like the foam of a cataract and extinguishing 
the candles one after another, he wrote and read 
the story of their crime. Each man and woman 
staggered forward, and, with hand a-tremble with, 
the chill of death, wrote his name. One wrote 
after his name "thief;" another, "from the Mahon 
galleys;" but each hand wrote or made his mark. 
They thrust their confession into a gourd, and 



The Centrality of God 199 

sealed it with a bit of rope and tar, and the 
doctor said, ''It is done/' and the cry of a prayer 
mixed with the moanings of the sea. The his- 
torian of this struggle says : 'Trayer is a major 
force. They did not bow, they bent. They gave 
way, as a sail shivers when the breeze fails; and 
this haggard group gradually assumed, by the 
clasping of hands and the bowing of heads, the 
attitude, varying but overwhelmed, of despair- 
ing confidence in God.'' And the doctor took 
and flung the last torch into the sea, and said, 
"Let us pray," when all sank upon their knees. 
The story grows in intensified interest. These 
repentant sinners knelt not in snow, but in water, 
for the sea was slowly rising above the sinking 
vessel's deck. ''The doctor alone remained 
standing." And all the sinking company to- 
gether joined in a prayer of contrition and hope. 
The doctor uttered the prayer, and these re- 
peated after him until at last no one repeated 
the words he announced. "He dropped his eyes. 
All heads were under water. Not one had risen. 
They had let themselves be drowned on their 
knees. The doctor took in his right hand the 



200 The Blessed Life 

gourd, and raised it above his head. The wreck 
went down. As it plunged, the doctor mur- 
mured the rest of the prayer. His shoulders 
remained out of the water for a moment, then 
his head, then there was nothing but his arm 
holding the gourd, as though showing it the 
Infinite. This arm disappeared. The profound 
sea had no more of a ripple than a cask of oil. 
The snow continued to fall. Something floated 
and drifted away on the waves into the gloom. 
It was the tarred gourd, which was sustained by 
its osier covering.'' 

What an argument is here, both for prayer 
and for conscience ! It amounts to this : we can 
not get away from the instinct of prayer nor 
from the kingliness of conscience. 

In Robert Browning's "Instans Tyrannus," 
which is, in brief, a history of a tyrant who found 
among his subjects a man he hated with violent, 
growing, vicious hatred, and wrought his will 
upon him, rejoicing in it as an inquisitor at the 
groans of his victim upon the rack, and with 
growing evil intent as growing pleasure, be- 
cause he thinks the man absolutely in his power. 



The Centrality of God 201 

Nothing can hinder his vengeance being 
wrought to the full. 

"When sudden . , . how think ye, the end? 
Did I say * without a friend?' 
Say rather, from marge to blue marge 
The whole sky grew his targe, 
With the sun's self for visible boss, 
While an Arm went across. 
Which the earth heaved beneath like a breast, 
Where the wretch was safely prest! 
Do you see? Just my vengeance complete, 
The man sprang to his feet. 
Stood erect, caught at God' s skirts and prayed I 
— So, I was afraid!" 

Such then combined conscience and prayer 
and the ineradicable instincts of both, and they 
become God's assertion of God's centrality in 
the world, which no denial can obliterate nor 
weaken. 

These qualities Christianity has in common 
with the uniform life of the heart. These are 
the race qualities. Besides, it has an altar, dis- 
tinct and perpetual; this not in theory, but 
in fact. The Buddhist had his avatar, his in- 
carnation of Brahm, but these are creations of 
Hindoo logic, with its five-term syllogism. 



202 The Blessed Life 

They are not man; they saw not, heard not. 
The avatars belonged to myth, not to history; 
but Christianity has an incarnation bdonging 
not to myth, but to history; an incarnation oc- 
curring under the very eyes of the thinking 
world, and seen not in a misty morning nor at 
gray evening, but under a noon and cloudless 
sky. No refracted ray of evening or morning, 
but the white rays of the noon-light, when Christ 
appeared among the sons of men. And God's 
centrality in our human life, conscience, destiny, 
is asserted when we see that ^'God was made 
flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his 
glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the 
Father, full of grace and truth." The incarnate 
Christ IS the prodigious truth of human philos- 
ophy. The incarnation is the injection of God 
into the veins of men; or, to change the figure, 
it IS God's invasion of the soul. Once allow the 
incarnation, and Christianity is assured forever. 
If Christ be incarnate God, God is central in the 
hopes and loves and lives of the world. The 
ancients, in so far as they were thoughtful, al- 
ways argued whether or not the gods had any 
care for man. They argued the gods cared not 



The Centrality of God 203 

for them, or cared little for them, or took de- 
light in pursuing them and cursing them and 
destroying them. Query — How can such a 
conception be obliterated from the thought of 
mankind? And the incarnation of God in Christ 
is the great, voluble, unanswerable answer. In 
Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon'' is what ap- 
peals to me as being one of the strongest argu- 
ments for the incarnation that has ever been 
made, and the passage is so well worth read- 
ing and pondering on, not as poetry simply, 
but as profound theology, as to be given here : 

"But up in heaven the high gods one by one 
Lay hands upon the draught that quickeneth, 

Fulfilled with all tears shed and all things done, 
And stir with soft imperishable breath 
The bubbling bitterness of life and death. 

And hold it to our lips, and laugh ; but they 

Preserve their lips from tasting night or day, 

Lest they too change and sleep, the fates that spun. 

The lips that made us and the hands that slay ; 

Lest all these change, and heaven bow down to none. 

Change and be subject to the secular sway 
And terrene revolution of the sun. 

Therefore they thrust it from them, putting time away. 

I would the wine of time, made sharp and sweet 
With multitudinous days and nights and tears 
And many mixing savors of strange years, 



204 The Blessed Life 

Were no more trodden of them under feet, 

Cast out and spilt about their holy places : 
That life were given them as a fruit to eat 
And death to drink as water ; that the light 
Might ebb, drawn backward from their eyes, and night 
Hide for one hour the imperishable faces ; 

That they might rise up sad in heaven, and know 
Sorrow and sleep, one paler than young snow. 

One cold as blight of dew and ruinous rain ; 
Rise up and rest and suffer a little, and be 
Awhile as all things bom with us and we. 

And grieve as men, and like slain men be slain/' 

Now, when Christ came, he was the answer 
to such philosophizing as this. He drank the 
wine we drink. He mixed with the fight in 
which we were combatants. He, barefoot, trod 
the rocky way our feet must walk. He met and 
embraced the cross on which we must be cruci- 
fied — ''He bore our sicknesses and carried our 
griefs."' 

To the world's wailing cry for sympathy, and 
to the appeal for help, Christ is the last and 
sufficient answer. He says, ''God careth for 
us." Who can doubt this, since "he took upon 
him the form of a servant and became obedient 
unto death, even the death of the cross/' I as- 



The Centrality of God 205 

sert, therefore, that the incarnation is not the 
theological tenet, but is a demand (mark that 
word, demand, not wish nor request), a demand 
of the whole world of hearts; and Christianity 
meets this demand with all adequacy, and flings 
God into the center of humanity. He is there. 
God is center of the physical system. He is 
there. This we can not deny, but in the incarna- 
tion he has flung himself into the heart of our 
flesh, and to eternal years man is wrapped in 
Godhood. Christ, with our nail-marks and 
thorn-marks and spear-marks in the flesh, and 
wearing our form — Christ, this Christ, is in the 
Godhead. That always seems to me the most 
astounding fact of philosophy and history. 
Surely, God careth for us. The open grave is 
a petty miracle weighed in the balance against 
God's coming into our flesh, and returning, car- 
rying our flesh back into God, to wear it there 
forever ! 

"Which things the angels desire to look into.'* 

And Christianity asserts God's centrality in 
the fact of worship; and the Sabbath-day is 
vocal as if thunderbolts were calling the name 



2o6 The Blessed Life 

of God; and therefore the Sabbath is central, 
vital, omnipresent, in the Christian system, and 
prayer is a credential of worship — prayer on its 
knees and with its face toward God, and the 
world lying behind the back like a smoke that 
drifts behind a flying train at evening. Worship 
and prayer are the continuous asserters of the 
centrality of God. And this is what the Scrip- 
tures mean in affirming, ''To thee shall prayer 
be made," and ''To thee shall all flesh come;'' 
and Jesus said, by way of quotation, "My house 
shall be called the house of prayer,'' a thought 
worthy of elaboration in this place, because 
worship in prayer is the very soul of Chris- 
tianity. 

Christ had come to the temple in splendid 
triumphal procession. The nameless multitude 
had given him a coronation. Seized by a holy 
impulse, this throng which soon would aid the 
cruel "Crucify him!" now for a brief hour hav- 
ing the gift of vision, beheld the kingliest who 
ever came to Zion's holy hill, and crowned him 
with clamor such as wakes when kings return 
in triumph from the field of war. With the flush 
of triumph on him, the Lord of temple and 



The Centrality of God 207 

Zion came into his house. Once more he sees 
the petty barter of the grasping merchantmen 
in the court of the Gentiles. His house was 
desecrated. His wrath burned hot. His venge- 
ance flashed from its scabbard. The kingly 
might he knew was his he used. He drove 
them from his house and Him. They looked 
behind them with hate and fear. Aforetime he 
had held the lash of cords which seemed to 
them like serpents hissing above their heads. 
Now, in more regal fashion, himself the executor 
of his own behests, with neither lash nor sword, 
he spilled their money on the marble floor and 
drove their traffic into destruction; and over 
the ruin of their greed he cried, ''It is written, 
My house shall be called the house of prayer!" 
then added the scathing ''but ye have made it 
a den of thieves." So terrible the misappro- 
priation! God meant prayer; man meant a den 
of thieveries. God meant heavenly-mindedness; 
man meant the mildew of the earth. How great 
the perversion! But out of this fearful hour 
we have Christ's conception of a church, and 
to have a thought so weighty is worth the 
wrenching even of a world. And such truths 



2o8 The Blessed Life 

as these can scarce come save with throes of 
mighty pain and travail of unusual sort. 

Here is the query: What is a church? Here 
is God's ansv^er : It is the house of prayer. We 
see it nov^. After his Word has given us light, 
it seems among the axioms of a holy life; but 
in truth the definition has the profundity of 
revelation. Count that definition profound 
v^hich, the more v^e study, the more certain v^e 
are of its validity. This definition bears that 
test. Christ gave principles. He seldom elab- 
orated. That he might v^ell leave to lesser souls. 
But w^hen he reveals principles, their apparent 
simplicity confounds us. But, like the laws of 
our lower world, the profoundest are the sim- 
plest. Give man the task of defining the church, 
and he will not fail us. He will assuredly elab- 
orate a definition; but it would not have been 
such as God has given us and God's Son has 
emphasized, as we may safely affirm. Let man 
define the church. The Greek will declare it 
to be a place of elegance, of aesthetics; a habita- 
tion for the marble figures of the unknown gods ; 
a place where an altar, may chance, may be 
draped with blood. The Roman will say it is 



The Centrality of God 209 

a place for sacrifice, and standing room for a 
pantheon of gods. The Jew will name it a place 
of ministering priests, of ascending incense, of 
swinging censer, of altar with its smoking sacri- 
fice, or the holiest place where God is hid. Let 
us define a church. It is a place for social and 
religious benefit, a cloistered quiet where men 
gather to w^ait for God. Let us define again. 
It is a house of preaching; it is a place where 
are heard the preacher's words of power, where 
from the sacred forum he declares the authentic 
will of God; or, rather, a place named a house 
of praise, where songs are sung whose halle- 
lujahs smite the rafters with their hands, while 
melody of man seems challenging the melody 
of angels in the praise of Him who is our com- 
mon Lord. It is a place where holy thoughts 
may win their way with man. Do we not see 
that each definition has merit? Not one is lack- 
ing in some element of truth, but they are as the 
crescent of the new moon hanging like a hope 
in the western skies. Each is a segment which 
lacks completeness. Our definitions have truth 
by littles, but what we need is the Divine whole. 

The sphere and not the hemisphere is what the 
14 



21 o The Blessed Life 

hunger of our thoughts demand. God's defini- 
tion satisfies our expectation and our need. A 
church is the house of prayer. Weigh that in 
the balance; it will not be found wanting. It 
is adequate. God's house is a shelter where 
man can pray; a windbreak from the tempest, 
where man's needs may find voice. 

Praying recognizes that thou and I, God and 
man, are the copartners in prayer. Prayer is 
no solitary, no recluse, like a monk in a lonely 
cell. It implies two. Man never prays except 
to some other. Prayer recognizes a life outside 
of and higher than ourselves. It admits the 
supremacy of God. Man never thinks to pray 
to his inferiors. The very moment, the very 
place, that man clutches for God, he has God's 
house above his head. But in prayer a man's 
thought is taken from himself to another. He 
is learning self-estrangement. True, he prays 
for himself, but his highest thought is soaring 
after God, and to get God into his life and 
thought is to bring self into subordination. We 
learn the mystery of attuning our spirit to the 
music of the master spirit. That becomes cen- 
tral, significant, absorbing. 



The Centrality of God 211 

Prayer fronts me and my littleness. When 
I pray, I do not need self-abasement. I am 
abased. I do not need to pray for humility; my 
prayer brings me to the dust. I pray; I talk 
to God; I tell my griefs to him. I spread my 
palms before his face that he may see the blood 
on my hands, crying, ^^I have no healing; heal 
thou me.'' Am I not brought to face my weak- 
ness? Will this not bring me to my knees? 
Self-righteousness can not get from God's house 
if it be a place of prayer; for when I pray, I 
dare not tell my goodness. My words scorch 
my lips; my foolish speech stumbles like a 
drunkard's steps. Tell God my goodness, when 
he sees my heart? When a man comes to God's 
house to pray, his good deeds seem to slip from 
him like a mist from the hills. He would fain 
have God think not on it. No man ever prayed 
long that he was not brought to a sense of his 
poverty of spirit. I pray. It is an appeal to 
God; it is an acknowledgment of insufficiency. 
When a storm tumbles the deep, the sailors 
pray. When our little son is sick we say, 
"Doctor, pray come to our boy's reHef;" and in 
prayer we cry : ''O help ! Our light is gone out; 



212 The Blessed Life 

our home is shadowed with a deep eclipse! O 
help! Ohelp!" 

God's house as a house of prayer dignifies 
the spirit. How shall we co-ordinate this truth 
and the last? How harmonize humility and 
dignity? 'Xet us ascend unto the hill of the 
Lord." Prayer brings us to God. When I 
do but speak his name, I lift up mine eyes. He 
is so good; he is high lifted up. But at his 
request, I come and talk with him. Do we not 
hear the widow say, ''I miss his words; they 
brought help to my spirit?'' Does not the 
lonely man declare, "I miss her; her words bade 
me be a man?" I come into God's presence 
in prayer. My speech is with him. I lay my 
cause before him. Contact with such dignity 
must ennoble life, and I have grown better, 
more self-respecting; yea, I did talk with God. 

Since the Church is the house of prayer, 
Divine service is begun when I enter God's 
house. 

Not singing, nor the voice of the minister's 
prayer; not the preaching, not the swelling of 
the organ's majectic music — these are not the 
points nor the appurtenances for worship; but 



The Centrality of God 213 

God's house is a place of prayer, and the mo- 
ment I enter the service is begun. Prayer fits 
my spirit as music the organ. Worship is 
prayer. I go to God. That means worship. 
And so, with bowed heads, we enter God's sanc- 
tuary, as is right. When we enter, the bowed 
head is our sign that the service has begun, and 
we give assent to each solemn observance of 
the holy praying place. 

God's house as a house of prayer is a house 
of equality. Prayer is a leveler. Kings wear 
sackcloth and ashes. What less have we? 
Does not sorrow break all barriers down ? Does 
not the plague bring strange companions? Did 
not the prisons hold strange friends in the 
bloody days of the Reign of Terror? Prayer 
in God's house is common need and common 
dignity. So in the Church there is no question 
of wealth or position or ancestry. "Who art 
thou?" "I am a suppliant at the feet of God." 
"Who art thouf "I am a suppliant at the feet 
of God." "Then we are brothers." So here 
are no classes. No distinction exists between 
learning and ignorance, between opulence and 
penury. All the world's aristocracies die here; 



214 The Blessed Life 

all the words with which we note social dis- 
tinctions are forgotten here. This is a place of 
prayer. Men before God have no time to say, 
''I am a patrician, I am a plebeian;" but simply 
say, hearts breaking with utter joy, ''We are 
thy sons.'' This is greater than all besides. And 
in that sublime cognomen, common blood seems 
flooding the veins of all. 

Christianity so asserts the centrality of God 
as to make it a perpetual credential of the 
world's faith. 

**Our little systems have their day ; 

They have their day and cease to be ; 

They are but broken lights of Thee, 

And Thou, O Lord, art more than they.'* 



THE HELPER CHRIST 

** I can do all things through Christ which strcngthencth me " 
William A. Quayle. Vakina. Geo. F. Root. 



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There is a hope so summer bright That all besides seems dim, 
We need no long - er yield to sin. Nor fear an-ces - tral taint ; 



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A hope as strong as eagle's flight When storm-winds yield to him 
So long as Christ will dwell within. We shall not fail nor faint. 

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That hope is Christ ; and Christ is ours : And so. His life di - vine 
Triumphant, we shall conquer all That would our way op-pose ; 



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Becomes, with plenitude of powers. Our sa - cra-ment-al wine. 
For we are res - cued from our fall Since our slain Christ a-rose. 



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A PRAYER 

L ORD JESUSy my heart would humbly yet gladly do all Thou 
biddest, for Thy commandment is exceeding broad. Thyself didst 
say, Ye believe in God, believe also in me, which thing I haste to do. 
Thou art God' s Son. Thou art God* s self. Thou forgive st sins, 
and who can forgive sins save God only ? Thou art the Judge of 
quick and dead, and who taketh this office upon him except the great 
God? Thou great, glad Savior, who dost run to my help what time 
with i77ipetuous and sinking Peter I call. Lord, save, or I perish ; 
help me to launch out upon the deep ; help me that I may know the 
love of Christ and the good things of the world to come, and the ener- 
gizing might of Thy Holy Spirit, and the cleansing of Thy precious 
blood, and the continuous presence of the Spirit, by whose abiding I 
sometimes sob and sometimes sing, Abba, Abba, Father, Help me, 
my Christ, to become acclimated to God, May I become inured to 
the jeopardies that beset a soul at war with principalities and powers, 
with riotous inen and measures, with sin^ s shameful encroachments^ 
with iniquity s insidious approaches and solicitations, — help me 
through it all to be a man of Thine own heart. May I walk with 
God, and may that sweet, pure companionship ennoble but not be- 
wilder^ cleanse but not quench, help but not hinder, and may m,y 
word of lip and meditation of heart be acceptable to Him who knows 
my downsitting and my uprising and my thoughts very far off! 

My soul aspires to love and give Thee not so much a martyr's 
death as a martyr* s life. Accept this love, though it be but a with- 
ered flower ; but wilt not thou, O tenderness and condescension in- 
finite, take and wear it as if it were a flower grown in royal gar- 
dens and plucked by a queen's white hands? Thou wilt; I know 
full well Thou wilt, and so rest quiet and rejoicing. Amen, 



CHAPTER XII 

Christianity's World Tie 



'From everlasting to everlasting, God" 
'Before Abraham 'mas, 1 Am" 



MY SOUL, ONE QUESTION 

Think* st thou, my soul, when thou art dead 

And lying quiet, nothing loath. 
The good of earth above thy bed 

Shall bind them as with sacred oath 
Because of what thou had^st been here. 

To be the best their lives could think 
And count inconsequent all fear 

In love of thee, and boldly drink 
All fountains dry that haled from God, 

And gladly do all gentle deeds 
For love of Christ, above the sod 

That holds thy dust like withered weeds ? 

If so it hap, thou livest yet. 

Thy death is but undated birth ; 

And love may smile through its regret, 
<* He lives perpetual in the earth." 



CHRIST binds the ages together, and, what 
is of loftier importance, he in himself and 
his ubiquitous brotherhood binds the antipodes 
of race together. He is 

"The tie that binds 
Our hearts in Christian love." 

I heard a minister tell of his being at Lisbon, 

and, having no command of the Portuguese 

tongue, was truly a stranger in a strange land. 

Having in his pocket some copies of the gospel 

in Portuguese, he handed them to some little 

lads playing near by. They, childlike, showing 

what the stranger had given them to some 

friends across the way, a man came across the 

street and greeted the minister, speaking, of 

course, in Portuguese; and when this minister 

could not understand nor reply, the man opened 

a hymn-book and pointed to the name of Jesus, 

which was a name both could read. They both 

looked at the word, looked at each other, 

laughed in each other's eyes, and reached out 

219 



220 The Blessed Life 

and shook each other's hands. Jesus made these 
strangers brothers and friends. That one word 
certified to their hearts that each was in the 
larger friendship of which Jesus told in saying, 
''I have called you friends/' And these two, 
utter strangers a moment ago, now walked down 
toward the wharf rejoicing and singing, one in 
Portuguese, the other in English: 

** Shall we gather at the river, 
Where bright angels' feet have trod?'' 

and bade good-bye, with good, sure hope to 
meet in heaven. Jesus is the certificate of the 
world's and the race's unity. 

In humanity is a centrifugal force which ap- 
peals to us as being mightier than its centripetal 
force. Men drift apart like scattering armies. 
Something must be invented to cement the many 
into one, to make them growingly cohesive. 
People gather into cliques, like a knot of col- 
lege boys or girls. Some force must be applied 
which will hold all men together. I have to 
afiirm that this power is discovered; and its 
name is Christ. He is the cohesive agent in 
the moral universe, and is more powerful 



Christianity's World Tie 221 

than gravitation's tug upon atoms through the 
bewildering spaces. Christ stretches across the 
years. But before discussing this fact, Christ 
as a world tie, I desire to introduce an instance 
showing conclusively that such a tie does exist 
in him. This instance is the hero-fidelity of the 
Christian African servant of David Livingstone 
(here quoted in full from ''The New Acts of the 
Apostles," because to abridge were to do in- 
justice to the heroic incident) : 

''At four o'clock next morning, May ist, 
Susi and Chuma, with four other devoted at- 
tendants, anxiously entered that grass hut at 
Ilala. The candle was still burning, but the 
greater light had gone out. Their great master, 
as they called him, was on his knees, his body 
stretched forward, his head buried in his hands 
upon the pillow. With silent awe they stood 
apart and watched him, lest they should invade 
the privacy of prayer. But he did not stir; there 
was not even the motion of breathing, but a 
suspicious rigidity of inaction. Then one of 
these black men, Matthew, softly came near, 
and gently laid his hands upon his cheeks. It 
was enough; the chill of death was there. The 



222 The Blessed Life 

great father of Africa's dark children was dead, 
and they were orphans. 

"The most refined and cultured Englishmen 
would have been perplexed as to what course 
to take. They were surrounded by superstitious 
and unsympathetic savages, to whom the un- 
buried remains of the dead man would be an 
object of dread. His native land was six thou- 
sand miles away, and even the coast was dis- 
tant fifteen hundred. A grave responsibility 
rested upon these simple-minded sons of the 
Dark Continent — a burden to which few of the 
wisest and ablest would have been equal. Those 
remains, with his valuable journals, instruments, 
and personal effects, must be carried to Zanzibar. 
But the body must first be preserved from de- 
cay, and they had no skill nor facilities for em- 
balming; and, if preserved, there were no means 
of transportation — no roads or carts, no beasts 
of burden available — the body must be borne 
on the shoulders of human beings; and, as no 
strangers could be trusted, they must themselves 
undertake the journey and the sacred charge. 
These humble children of the forest were grandly 
equal to the occasion, and they resolved among 



Christianity's World Tie 223 

themselves to carry that body to the seashore, 
and not give it into any other hands until they 
could surrender it to his countrymen. And, to 
insure safety to the remains and security to the 
bearers, it must be done with secrecy. They 
would gladly have kept secret even their mas- 
ter's death, but the fact could not be concealed. 
God, however, disposed Chitambo and his sub- 
jects to permit these servants of the great mis- 
sionary to prepare his emaciated body for its 
last journey, in a hut built for the purpose on 
the outskirts of the village. 

^'Now watch these black men, as they rudely 
embalm the body of him who had been to them 
a savior. They tenderly open the chest and 
take out the heart and viscera; these, with a 
poetic and pathetic sense of fitness, they reserve 
for his beloved Africa. The heart, that for 
thirty-three years had beat for her welfare, must 
be buried in her own bosom. And so one of 
the Nassik boys, Jacob Wainwright, read the 
simple service of burial, and under the moula- 
tree at Ilala that heart was deposited; and the 
tree, carved with a simple inscription, became 
his monument. Then the body was prepared 



224 The Blessed Life 

for its long journey; the cavity was filled with 
salt, brandy poured into the mouth, and the 
corpse laid out in the sun for fourteen days to 
be dried, and so reduced to the condition of a 
mummy. Then it was thrust into a hollow 
cylinder of bark, over this was sewn a covering 
of canvas, the whole package securely lashed to 
a pole, and so it was made ready to be borne 
between two men upon their shoulders. 

''And yet the enterprise was scarcely begun, 
and the worst of their task was yet before them. 
The sea was far away, and their path lay through 
a territory where nearly every fifty miles would 
bring them to a new tribe, to face new difficul- 
ties. Nevertheless, Susi and Chuma took up 
their precious burden, and, looking to Living- 
stone's God for help, began the most remark- 
able funeral march on record. They followed 
the track their master had marked with his foot- 
steps when he penetrated to Lake Banweolo, 
passing to the south of Lake Liembe, which 
is a continuation of Tanganyika, then crossing 
to Unyanyembe. Whenever it was found out 
that they were bearing a dead body, shelter was 
hard to get, or even food; and at Kasekera they 



Christianity's World Tie 225 

could get nothing they asked, except on con- 
dition that they would bury the remains they 
were carrying. And now their love and gen- 
eralship were put to a new and severe test. 
But again they were equal to the emergency. 
They made up another package like the pre- 
cious burden, only that it contained branches 
instead of human bones, and this, with mock 
solemnity, they bore on their shoulders to a 
safe distance and scattered the contents far and 
wide in the brushwood, and came back with- 
out the bundle. Meanwhile others of their party 
had repacked the remains, doubling them up 
into the semblance of a bale of cotton cloth, 
and so once more they managed to get what 
they needed and get on with their charge. 

"The true story of that nine-months' march 
has never yet been written, and it never will be, 
for the full data can not be supplied. But here 
is material waiting for some coming English 
Homer or Milton to crystallize into one of the 
world's noblest epics; and it deserves the mas- 
ter hand of a great poet-artist to do it justice. 

"See these black men, whom your scientific 

philosophers would place at one remove from 
15 



226 The Blessed Life 

the gorilla, run all manner of risks, by day and 
night, for forty weeks; now going round by a 
circuitous route to insure safe passage; now 
compelled to resort to stratagem to get their 
precious burden through the country; some- 
times forced to fight their foes in order to carry 
out their holy mission. Follow them as they ford 
the rivers and traverse trackless deserts daring 
perils from wild beasts and relentless wild men; 
exposing themselves to the fatal fever, and bury- 
ing several of their little band on the way; yet 
on they went, patient and persevering, never 
fainting nor halting, until love and gratitude 
had done all that could be done, and they laid 
down at the feet of the British consul, on the 
1 2th of March, 1874, all that was left on earth 
of Scotland's great hero, save that buried heart. 
^'When, a little more than a month later, the 
cofifin of Livingstone was landed in England, 
April 15th, it was felt that no less a shrine than 
Britain's greatest burial-place could fitly hold 
such precious dust. But so improbable and in- 
credible did it seem that a few rude Africans 
could actually have done this splendid deed, at 
such cost of time and risk, that, not until the 



Christianity's World Tie 227 

fractured bones of the arm, which the lion 
crushed at Mabotsa thirty years before, identi- 
fied the body, was it certain that these were 
Livingstone's remains. And then, on the i8th 
of April, 1874, such a funeral cortege entered 
the great Abbey of Britain's illustrious dead 
as few warriors or heroes or princes ever drew 
to that mausoleum. And those faithful body- 
servants, who had religiously brought home 
every relic of the person or property of the 
great missionary explorer, were accorded places 
of honor. And well they might be. No tri- 
umphal procession of earth's mightiest con- 
queror ever equaled, for sublimity, that lonely 
journey through Africa's forests. An example 
of tenderness, gratitude, devotion, heroism, 
equal to this the world has never seen. The 
exquisite inventiveness of a love that on the 
feet of Jesus lavished tears as water and made 
tresses of hair a towel and broke the alabaster 
flask for his anointing; the feminine tenderness 
that lifted his mangled body from the cross and 
wrapped it in new linen, with costly spices, and 
laid it in a virgin tomb, — even this has at length 
been surpassed by the ingenious devotion of the 



228 The Blessed Life 

cursed sons of Canaan. The grandeur and 
pathos of that burial scene amid the stately 
columns and arches of England's famous Abbey- 
loses its luster when contrasted with that sim- 
pler scene near Ilala, in God's greater cathedral 
of Nature, whose columns and arches are the 
trees, whose surpliced choir are the singing 
birds, whose organ is the moaning wind — the 
grassy carpet was lifted, and dark hands laid 
Livingstone's heart to rest! And in the great 
cortege that moved up the nave of Westminster, 
no truer nobleman was found than that black 
man, Susi, who in illness had nursed the Blan- 
tyre hero, had laid his heart in Africa's bosom, 
and whose hand was now upon his pall." 

Christ claimed for himself an unbegun and 
an unending life, and the claim, though auda- 
cious, was just. "Before Abraham was, I am," 
is his sublimest personal reference. It came like 
a sentry's challenge, "Who goes there?" en- 
forced with bayonet at the breast. We must 
halt. In sheer majesty this claim towers like 
the Himalayas. Immortality is life refusing to 
die. And Jesus thought it scarce worth while 
to affirm that of himself. He included it. Im- 



Christianity's World Tie 229 

mortality, he gave us to know, was a quality of 
soul. He did not argue, but announced. Jesus 
was as one to whom the truth is so familiar that 
it is commonplace, and announced immortality 
as a truism of the soul. 

Where philosophy had failed, he succeeded. 
Where poets dreamed, he gave authoritative 
utterance, though his revelation was exalted, as 
the fiction of poets had not been. Jesus afifirmed 
immortality of man, and he, as man's brother, 
must possess all man's inheritance; but as the 
elder brother, more. He was not simply to live 
on unendingly since life was begun, but he had 
always been. There is no braggadocio in this 
affirmation. It is simple and natural. The Jews 
wrung it from him. Let us thank them for 
having occasioned so large a revelation. A citi- 
zen of the eternities — this is what Jesus said he 
was, thereby identifying himself with God, for 
it is God alone who ''inhabiteth eternity." 

The unbegun and the unending, the universal 
character — this is Christ's doctrine of himself. 
Incarnate, he was man. He was the gemts 
homo. A dweller in a province, confined in life 
to a single principality, he is not provincial in 



230 The Blessed Life 

mien, dialect, accent, action. He belonged to 
the world; or, in a larger phase, the world be- 
longed to him. We mark him as the traveler 
who is equally at home in every civilization and 
in every clime, whose speech does not betray 
him. Localism leaves no dust on his garments 
to tell his province. There comes with this bear- 
ing something of mighty movement, like the 
swell of the sea. We feel the vigor communi- 
cated to ourselves. Both mass and majesty are 
present, and infuse themselves like an elixir in 
the blood. But Jesus was no traveler. He was 
the child of geographical limitations. Yet when 
he speaks, every race claims him. Each zone 
cries, "He is ours!" He speaks as from the 
center of the world; is equally distant from all, 
and equally near to all. 

If we shall study the artists, this thing will 
impress us — each has the limitation of his age 
and country on him. The Flemish artist has 
painted a Dutch face; and the Italian has given 
us a Roman Madonna. The art was provincial. 
The same is observedly true in literature. We 
shall know a man's nationality if we hear him 
speak, though we do not see his face. The 



Christianity's World Tie 231 

poets are, in the main, local. Each has his hint 
of truth. Each has his note to contribute to 
some unfinished melody. We know the poet and 
the era from his unconscious self-revelation. 
What he had he gave; but his holdings v^ere 
in a single province of all the continents. But 
when genius of a commanding order speaks, he 
thrills us by the lack of the local and the pres- 
ence of the unusual. Mediocrity is provincial; 
genius is cosmopolitan. If the chief poet speaks, 
we say he was born here; and again, he was 
bom here, and thus the comment runs, and, by 
our own estimate, he will be born in every con- 
tinent and of every race. The world begot him. 
He was not local. He spake for man. Burns 
was a clarion voice; we could not misconceive 
him. His bonnie speech declares his home to 
be by gray glen in Scotland's hills. His words 
delight us because they exhale odors of pine and 
heather, and laugh like highland tarn a-journey 
to the sea. His localism is his charm. Men 
love the individual flavor in dialect; but a chief 
singer is without a local mother-tongue. He 
speaks the universal language which all men 
understand without learning it. 



232 The Blessed Life 

True, there is a hint of the universal in the 
narrowest hfe. World qualities hide in every 
heart. The major instincts of the soul are like 
stars, at home in every sky. The heroes of Troy 
and Gettysburg are contemporaries. But at the 
end the truth is still the same. Some men are 
local and some are universal. Jew, Greek, 
Roman, Saxon, those are not what mankind 
in the passion of its heart demands. Mankind 
wants a man. One of the strange facts of nat- 
ural history is that man alone seems indigenous 
to all the zones. Tropic suns and arctic night 
are alike salubrious to him. He is not creature 
of but master of climates and conditions; and 
this universality, this at-homeness in all latitudes 
must be a mark of the King of men. The Jew, 
on seeing his face and hearing his voice, must 
cry, ''My brother!'' and the Greek must recog- 
nize that he is Hellas' son; and the proud Roman 
must see in him such imperial dignity as marks 
the citizen of Rome; and the Saxon must feel 
this is the scion of his royal line. There is one 
man, and only one, to whom these remarks may 
apply. There have been great spirits in every 
race; there has been but one great spirit of the 



Christianity's World Tie 233 

race. Moses was a Jew, Julius Caesar was a 
Roman, Pericles was a Greek, Napoleon was a 
Frenchman, Goethe was a German, Cromwell 
was an Englishman, Lincoln was an American — 
but Christ zvas a man. He was brother to them 
all. We can not feel he was a Jew. Though 
born at Bethlehem, reared in Nazareth, slain at 
Jerusalem — our consciousness repels the impu- 
tation that he was a Hebrew. He spoke that 
tongue, was saturated with that thought, com- 
panied with that race; yet the flavor of his per- 
sonality is not Hebrew, but human. We listen 
to him, follow him, dream his dreams, stand on 
his mount of vision, imbibe his catholicity, be- 
come enlarged by contact with his majestic 
ideas, grow glad in his revelation of God, burn 
with his passion for others, forget self in the 
amazement of his self-abnegation, from him 
learn the primacy of the heart and the art of 
loving God supremely, find in him the secret 
of life and love and prayer — and all the while 
his nationality has never once occurred to us. 
"Here is a man" — this we thought. "The world 
has grown a man," we said. The universal in 
him swallowed up the provincial. 



234 The Blessed Life 

You can not think of Christ as an ancient. 
He was of yesterday, but is Hkewise of to-day 
and of to-morrow. His spirit is modern. Of 
many men we say their century produced them. 
They and their age were adjusted each to the 
other. Athanasius and Charlemagne, Peter the 
Hermit and Washington, Barbarossa and 
Savonarola, belonged to their times as the 
cedars to Lebanon. But in other ages they 
might have been misfits. You can not conceive 
them apart from their century. But Jesus is at 
home in all the centuries. "The same yester- 
day, to-day, and forever." He steps into each 
era, and seems a legitimate part of it. He is 
never a foreigner, but always at home. 

We say of men, they are dreamers or doers, 
they are poets or reformers, they are civilians 
or soldiers. There are differences which seem. 
to drive men from some fields and shut them 
in others. We recognize human limitation. An 
adaptation to soldiership is a hindrance from 
statecraft. These are truisms of observation. 
But you will apply these rules in vain to Jesus. 
He will "not be holden of them.'' He was 



Christianity's World Tie 235 

dreamer, poet, reformer, legislator, statesman, 
soldier, orator, organizer, theologian, philos- 
opher, publicist, prophet, priest, king. His 
adaptations were universal. He has exhausted 
genius. What he was not, man can not be. We 
have but fragments of his sayings, yet these have 
revolutionized the world. He seems to have 
passed into every domain of human thought 
and bankrupted it. He drank 'life to the lees." 
Christ was appropriative and originative. 
What he found good he used; what was need- 
ful he created. He w^as a poet — a maker. The 
Spirit of creation was on him as at the framing 
of the world. He was destructionist as Socrates; 
he was constructionist as Paul. There was in 
him humility and self-restraint, and wild audac- 
ity outranging eagles. The contraries of all hu- 
man life met in him. Joy and passion of grief, 
failure and success, love and curses, his portion 
in death and life. Tossed he was on the sea of 
our passion, but never shipwrecked; brother of 
our weakness, but never overborne. No soul but 
will find in Jesus an experience answering to his 
needs. Tempted, triumphant, crucified, glori- 



236 The Blessed Life 

fied; exciting malevolence that never sleeps, 
and love that never dies — what an amazement 
is our Christ! 

All life centers in him. He is the emporium 
at which meets the traffic of the world. Hear 
him, and you cry, I have listened to the world's 
thinker. See his cross, and you say, I have be- 
held the world's divinest love. See his un- 
swerving purpose, and you feel this is the un- 
conquerable will. In him all qualities of soul 
harmonize. He is not thinker or lover or mag- 
netic will, but he is thinker and lover and mag- 
netic will — he is man; man in his masterful 
moods and at his best; man, vital, virile, natural, 
originative, kingly, august. '^Without begin- 
ning of days or end of life," with youth eternal 
and Divine, with conquest flinging royal purple 
about his shoulders, the Son of man, and Son 
of God, Christ is the one cosmopolitan. 

And, in consequence, Christ is the mighty 
cohesive fact and personality in civilization and 
the centuries. He alone among the sons of men 
is qualified "to make all one.'' 



A HYMN OF REFORM 

Thou who didst bring, in days of old, 

God's message from above, 
Dwell in our hearts lest they grow cold, 

Forgetful of thy love. 

Thou Fire of God, for thee we pray 

Our sacrifice to burn 
So that the thing we do this day 

May God's approval earn. 

For Thou hast made us in our day 

Reformers of the world — 
Elijahs, who with Ahabs may 

Into the fight be hurled. 

As with Elijah long ago 

Thou didst thy forces join. 
And make the heedless heathen know 

Thy sword was at thy loin; 

So join with us and bring our fight 

To a victorious peace ; 
Because for Thee and by thy might 

We war and never cease. 



A PRAYER 

WE bless our God for the communion of saints^ for the citizen- 
ship which is in heaven^ and for the spacious Christ, He orbs our 
life. He shames our narrownesses. He divides us fro77t our puny 
dislikes and likes. He bids us gird the loins of larger loves and 
wider friendships. He makes the centuries of m.en our playfellows 
and schoolmates. He eliminates our shabby gentilities by the fall 
of his tears on the page where we have written their genealogies. 
He brings us into a wide place where there is neither Jew nor 
Greeks neither bond nor free ^ but where we catch the hands of the 
lovers of God, and experience loves that are rightly fraternal. 
We bless Thee^ Thou hast taught us this lesson of enlarge77ie7it^ 
Thou Lord Christ. ' Twere a pity to be narrow and Thou so 
broad in Thy love and pity — so broad as that the wide seas are 
straits compared with Thee. 

Make my life roomy, radiant, and full of laughter learned fro?7i 
Christ, my Savior^ Amen. 



CHAPTER XIII 

The Blessed Life 



"In Him was life" 

"The love of Christ constrAtneth us' 



BEYOND THE GATES 

When day is done and from the gaudy sky 

The glory fades, 
Then quiet falls ; and rest comes by and by 

With night's dear shades. 

When life is done, and climbed its ragged steeps, 

All hot suns set ; 
When in vast joy that neither sighs nor weeps 

We then are met, — 

What rest shall hold our hands, and grace. 

Like evening psalm. 
Shall whisper peace ! Then from the troubled face 

Heaven's blessed calm 

Shall every tear-stain wipe away, and fear ; 

With Christ at hand 
No heart-ache can through golden years draw near 

That heavenly land. 



CHRISTIANITY is a life, and not a voca- 
tion, the difference between the two being 
this: vocation is a fragment; Hfe is an entirety. 
Our life is all we are. Christianity supplies the 
blessed life. 

A flower may be, as the botanist says, stamen 
and pistil, calyx and corolla; but no botanist has 
a flower; he dissects blooms. He keeps, if you 
will, an anthological morgue. Those petals in 
his palm are not a flower. No botanist creates 
a flower for us. He can not. His art is dis- 
sective, not constructive. But, you will answer, 
speaking in his behalf, all these parts equal a 
flower? No. A blossom is not an equation, is 
not mathematics. But the child wandering 
through the meadows rich with bloom and 
affluent with sunshine and with odors — the 
child with apron overrun with blossoms as liv- 
ing springs with sky-clear waters — she has a 
hint of what flowers are. Their plucked and 

withered loveliness has appealed to the child 
i6 241 



242 The Blessed Life 

eyes and hands and heart, so that, with virtuous 
offense, she has coveted and gathered the beauty 
v^hich an hour ago nodded to the sun and wind. 
A woman knows what a flower is, given her by 
a lover to be kissed, dreamed over, hid as in 
her heart in some dear book, to lend it fra- 
grance and memories forever. And poets know 
what flowers are. Hear our chief singer say — 

"O it came o'er my ear like the sweet south 
That breathes upon a bank of violets, 
Stealing and giving odor;" 

and though he sings of music, yet has he put a 
violet in our hands. The poet makes this pre- 
cious flower live and bloom; but such art lies 
beyond the botanist. He describes the mech- 
anism, but what time he tells the parts he steals 
the beauty. Therefore ask not botanist, but 
poet, to gather a violet for you, and you shall 
know that a violet is a tatter of blue torn from 
God's sky, hiding in quiet and shadowed places, 
exhaling beauty like precious odors. A flower 
is not root and stem and petal and color and 
aroma, is not an aggregation of parts. Such a 
thought misses the flower; for a flower is life. 



The Blessed Life 243 

What IS a poem? Let the rhetorician tell? 
No, for he will extract its vital juices, and pile 
its parts together like dry bones. He will prate 
of rhyme and rhythm, spondee, dactyl, trochee, 
anapaest; but is ''^none'' a pile of dust like an 
hour-glass's waste? I will not thank the rheto- 
rician to read the poem for me, but will rather 
ask the poet to read the poem to me. One will 
give me parts; the other will give me the poem, 
which is a rare and dainty life, and therefore 
defies description. 

Who will describe Lorna Doone? She is set 
as in a picture, yet who will paint her portrait? 
Listen, Jan Ridd, I will describe your Lorna: 
lily throat; ruby, mobile lips; brow fair, with dear 
hair clustering about it like a wildwood tangle 
of vines; cheek with flitting shadow of blush — 
''Stop!'' gert Jan Ridd roars as if he were 
a-singing in the village choir, "Have done — that 
is not my Lorna!" Neither is it. He loved 
her, and to him she was indescribable as heaven. 

So in more generous measure Christianity is 
a life, and defies description, and is a great, beau- 
tiful, and inspiring whole. The blessed life is 
no fragment, but is all we are. Learning, occu- 



244 '^^^ Blessed Life 

pation, thought, love — these be parts. Repent- 
ance, faith, justification, regeneration, adoption, 
witness of the Spirit, growth in grace — these 
constitute an enumeration of particulars. They 
are skeletal. Religion is all these, and more. 
It is life. Not that this life divine does not re- 
quire as symptoms these things catalogued. 
There is no virile religious life unless there be 
a repentance reaching the far corners of the 
heart; and faith reaching the redeeming Christ, 
whose blood is the sole antidote for sin; and justi- 
fication, whose freedom from the law's just curse 
shall set our spirit to inextinguishable laughter; 
and a regeneration which gives a new name and 
a new birthday and a new heart and a new set 
of holy affections, longings, and satisfactions; 
and an adoption which shall legalize our re- 
lation to God and make us sing rather than 
say, '^Abba, Father;" and a witness of the 
Spirit to this new light and life set glowing in 
the soul; and then the pains and pulses and 
powers of growth which counts not itself to have 
apprehended, but, forgetting those things which 
are behind, presses toward those things which 
art before, — all these are in the new life, but all 



The Blessed Life 245 

these are not the new Hfe. It inckides them; they 
do not inckide it. And when, with yearning that 
can not be uttered, we wait for this vision, there 
come the voice and the advent of the Christ 
and the voice from heaven, answering, ''In him 
is Hfe." Jesus is Christianity. 

When having seen the Christ and heard him 
and remembering he is the gospel, we may hope 
to discover some basal truths of the Christ-life; 
and only the Christ-life is the blessed life. There 
is no so sure truth. Watching Christ, we dis- 
cover that Christianity is visible. Christ is 
meant, not for hiding, but for revelation. Odors 
distill themselves in the dark. Waters percolate 
through soils, and feel their way toward the un- 
seen ocean. Life's ministry is one of revelation. 
Genius gropes toward self-revealment. It builds, 
discovers, writes, speaks, conquers, whereat we 
rise to realization, and cry ''Genius." Christian- 
ity is God's ultimate truth, "to which the whole 
creation moves." And shall a rare picture be 
painted to be turned to the wall and all its beauty 
die in dust and darkness? Shall music keep 
dumb, or thrill silences with evangels such as 
angels wake? Yet is Christianity both — both 



246 The Blessed Life 

beauty and music, and meant for observation. 
To hide these five talents were a sin unpardon- 
able. 

And when we come to give it thought, God 
is always feeling his way toward revelation. He 
will reveal himself. No less a purpose hath our 
God. When the Trinity was sole occupant of 
heaven and all the roomy universe, his voice 
said, 'Xet us create angels,^' and the angels were; 
and so God stood revealed to intelligences out- 
side of Deity. Once more, upon a day marked 
only in the calendar of heaven, God said, ''I will 
disclose to angels I have made a trifle of the 
hidings of my power;" and on a sudden, angels 
standing on the shores of heaven, looking into 
the gloaming of infinite spaces, saw systems of 
suns shaken from the Almighty's hands like 
drops of dew from tall cedars, and the physical 
universe, with its complex and tireless motion, 
had made one revelation more of God. Cen- 
turies poured themselves swiftly from the hour- 
glass of the Lord, and God spake yet once more, 
saying, "Let us make man in our own image;" 
and this gray world, which wheeled to its sun- 
rise tenantless, came to its evening with man's 



The Blessed Life 247 

head resting on its bosom as on a pillow. So 
had our God taken one step more to disclose 
the miracle of the Godhead. But in 'Hhese last 
times" he showed us his Son ! All this pageant 
had moved toward the Christ. Jesus was the 
climax of Divine doings. "I will send my Son. 
Sinai they have had : I will show them Calvary/' 
The invisible God, feeling his way toward self- 
revelation in angels and suns and man, now 
shows us Christ, ''who is the image of the in- 
visible God," ''for it pleased the Father that in 
him should all fullness dwell," being "full of 
grace and truth." And in the amazement we call 
Christ, God had found his way to complete self- 
revelation. Christ was God, and what man 
ought to be, and — say it with abashed spirits 
and in the shadow of the cross — ^what man may 
be. Christ is revelation, as he is God and the 
Gospel. In assonance with this epic history of 
Divine revealing, Christianity must reveal God. 
A dumb man is not a whole man. He lacks the 
art of expression, and his soul is hindered in 
self-revealment. Religion, while not show, must 
reveal itself. Christ was this first, God rendered 
visible; and Christianity is Christ rendered vis- 



248 The Blessed Life 

ible. Christianity is visible religion, and will 
always make itself seen, being no manuscript 
written in invisible ink. God did show us re- 
ligion in Christ Jesus. A heathen said, ^'Christ 
is what God would be like if we saw him;'' and 
we must reverently afifirm that a Christian should 
be what Christ would be like if we saw him. 
''We saw him" was the very poetry and power 
of the apostolic thought — Christ, the seen God. 
The blessed life is the Spirit-enabled life. On 
becoming possessed of Christ, we become Spirit- 
possessed. Across the meadow-lands of the 
heart blow winds unknown before, and in the 
fallow lands of the spirit grow flowers and fruits 
not native to that land before. Spinoza was 
named the ''God-intoxicated man;" such men are 
we in case we are Christians in word and deed 
and thought. We are ingulfed in God. He is 
horizon, nadir, and zenith to the soul. He en- 
folds us as the air enfolds the mountains. He 
leaves us self-possessed, yet makes us God-pos- 
sessed. Here is a great mystery, but it is the 
mystery of godliness. We are our own, and yet 
we "are not our own;" we are "bought with a 
price." "I live, yet not I, but Christ, liveth in 



The Blessed Life 249 

me," said the greatest apostle, who was the the- 
ologian of the apostolic company; and he spake 
not as a reasoner in theology so much as he 
spake as a man who had experienced Christ. 
A Christian has God, and God has the Christian; 
a state and relation so holy as to thrill the spirit 
to ecstacy. To those who are ''the sons of God" 
all best things are assumed to be indigenous. 
"Now the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 
meekness, temperance," and we must feel the 
accuracy of the concluding saying, ''Against 
such there is no law." No one could fault such 
a life. The Blessed Life is a life of love and joy, 
and is its own Beatitude. God, who gives us 
Christ, will "with him also freely give us all 
things," as says the Scripture. We are long-suf- 
fering and gentle, we possess goodness and faith, 
we are meek and temperate, we "walk in the 
light as he is in the light, and the blood of Jesus 
Christ his Son cleanses us from all sin." Who 
would not pray to live so radiant a life? Who 
does not know that such a life is blessed beyond 
the touch and rasp of care and worry? "The 
kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but 



250 The Blessed Life 

righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy 
Ghost/' was the estimate of one who had this 
kingdom in his heart. The blessed life is the 
rested life. Weigh that word, my soul. Sink 
into its sweet seclusions. Know the comfort of 
the Christ who said and says, ''Come unto me, 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest." This poet knew whereof he 
wrote in saying : 

**I know no words that are more sweet than these 
In all the Savior's tender promises — 
Sweeter than balm to souls with earth oppressed — 
*Come unto me and I will give you rest.' 

* Come unto me,' Christ whispers as he stands 
And shows the nail-prints in his bleeding hands ; 

* O weary one, I love thee ; be my guest ; 
Come unto me and find the promised rest." 

* Come unto me.' O words divinely sweet ! 
My heart remembers what his lips repeat, 
And all day long they thrill my weary breast, 
And I am glad because of promised rest." 

This is the "rest that remaineth to the people 
of God." A part of it is here; the greatness 
of it is yonder. This blessed life in Christ hath 
blessed rest. There is labor, but labor for God 



The Blessed Life 251 

and with him is blessed, and the rest goes with 
Ihe work. We, too, ''have meat to eat that ye 
know not of,'' and in that strength we might 
struggle forty days if need were so. Christians 
have rest men know not of. Kipling has some- 
times thrown his plummet very deep, but no- 
where deeper than in this moan of weariness : 

* * Over the edge of the purple down 

Where the single lamp-light gleams, 
Know ye the road to the Merciful Town 

That is hard by the sea of dreams — 
Where the poor may lay their wrongs away. 

And the sick may forget to weep? 
But, we — ^pity us ! O, pity us ! 
We wakeful, ah, pity us ! — 
We must go back with Policeman Day — 

Back from the City of Sleep ! 

Weary they turn from scroll and crown, 

Fetter, and prayer, and plow — 
They that go up to the Merciful Town, 

For her gates are closing now. 
It is their right in the baths of the night 
Body and soul to steep: 
But we, — pity us ! ah, pity us ! 

Over the edge of the purple down, 

Ere the tender dreams begin, 
Look — we may look — at the Merciful Town, 

But we may not enter in ! 



252 The Blessed Life 

Outcasts all, from her guarded wall 

Back to our watch we creep : 
We, pity us, ah, pity us I 
We wakeful, O pity us !- — 
We that go back with Policeman Day- 
Back from the City of Sleep ! 



But these weary, weary folk could, if they 
would, find rest when days were big with toil 
and nights with pain, and life's wide spaces were 
sown to disasters and their hopes were dead — 
might find rest sweeter than the rest of quiet 
sleeping, in Him on whom we cast all our care, 
seeing he careth for us. So blessed is the blessed 
life! 

Christianity is a supernatural fact and force, 
for "in him was life/' Christianity is an expe- 
dition from heaven to the soul. We are born, 
not of the will of flesh, but of God. An inspired 
Book ministers to a new and heavenly life, and 
the new birth is such a marvel as to pass as 
proof of every miracle of God's dealing in the 
world. Insist that Christianity is life. The dif- 
ference between the inert and the vital is, the 
one is shaped, while the other shapes. One is 
the vessel on the wheel; the other, the potter 



The Blessed Life 253 

at the wheel. You may always find Hfe-reshap- 
ing ingredients. The seed will take soil and sun 
and waterdrop and air, and invent a rose, but 
no chemist can work so great a wonder. One 
seed did this, having life at the heart. A tree 
and a crag, which is the mightier? Why, the 
crag assuredly, for has it not mass and weight 
and imposing majesty? Yet consider, all the 
crag can do is stand and wait. Grim endurance 
is its solitary virtue. The crag is watching its 
own demolition. Summer storms are wasting 
it; every frost is bidding it die; the elements 
conspire against it, and its doom is near. But 
the tree? It borrows a crevice of the crag in 
which to cradle its babyhood. The winds snarl 
at it, and smite it to and fro, a toy of their 
passions, but the poor twig has life. It is not 
made, but makes. It does not wait, but grows, 
and will gather ingredients and turn adverse cir- 
cumstances to its help and growth. The crag 
waits while the tree eats its heart away. The 
tree is becoming masterful and dominant, and 
at the end the crag will crouch like a couchant 
lion at the foot of this peerless pine, so great 
is life. 



254 The Blessed Life 

Life, then, is another name for control, and 
the largest life is the largest control. Christian- 
ity is life, and grows, dominates, takes possession 
of a soul like the owner of a palace, and asks 
no odds, and comes, by virtue of its vitality, to 
assume regality. And life succeeds, not because 
of, but in spite of circumstances. Circumstances 
can not account for Jesus. In his presence their 
argument is dumb. He was in spite of them. 
So Christian life is a sort of thrilling danger, 
though it knows not any fear. Triumph is sure. 
Though "principalities and powers" are hostile, 
the soul feels neither doubt nor trepidation. The 
Christian is independent of the world. Saint- 
hood and manhood are the resultants of neither 
heredity nor environment, but are the splendid 
achievements of the life of God in the human 
spirit. The edelweiss grows on the fringes of 
eternal winter; so does Christian purity grow in 
the face of the largest moral hostility. It is 
life, and boasts life's prerogative. In the Chris- 
tian struggle, sin is not become enervated, but 
the Christian is become omnipotent. He denies 
earth to be his master. He is not truculent, but 
God and his own destiny — these nerve his heart. 



The Blessed Life 255 

The turbulencies of this world's wild tempest 
do not even awake unrest, for has he not the 
sure promise of ''the morning star?'' 

Christianity, being the largest life, is the larg- 
est control known to man. The Christ-life seizes 
all the soul, and fires it with the glory of assured 
and perpetual triumph. Christ liveth in us. His 
power becomes our possession. ''We can do all 
things through Christ which strengtheneth us,'' 
is the faith that nerves our arm and fructifies 
endeavor. We run unwearied, and we fight se- 
cure. "To die is gain." Whichever way the 
battle turns, the victory is ours. We are not 
fatalists, but theists, and believe, according to 
God's Word, "All things work together for good 
to them that love God,'' I know not anything so 
quieting to perturbed spirits, so solacing to sor- 
row and to care, as such a promise. God is on 
our side, and "if God be for us, who can be 
against us?" Here we take our stand. We can 
do no other, nor would we do other if we could. 
The grace of God is sufficient, and what more 
could brain and heart demand? One day I went 
into a sick saint's chamber. She was surely dy- 
ing. The fatigue of death was on her. For 



256 The Blessed Life 

weeks she had not touched weary head upon a 
pillow. Her breath came by spasms. To live 
even at this feeble rate was struggle, yet her 
face was bright as if the morning light, unhin- 
dered by a cloud, was shining there. Her voice 
was sweet as laughter, though faint as a sick 
child's. Her hands caught the pastor's with such 
fidelity of grasp as makes the heart grow 
stronger. Her welcome was full of cheer. She 
forgot herself, wdiich is the art of Christ. Jesus' 
name set her heart aglow. And one day the dear 
saint said, 'Tastor, I have a message, will you 
deliver it?" On my answering ''Yes," this was 
the message she gave: ''Yesterday I was feeling 
my way around the room [for she was blind], 
grasping the w^alls to guide me and uphold me, 
for I was sorely weak, when on a sudden. Death, 
I thought, stood beside me. My breath failed; 
there was a strange tightening at my throat, and 
I thought, 'Surely death has come,' and — then 
[and she fought for breath to tell her message 
through] I, thinking this is death, looked up, 
and beheld Christ. It was rapture, rapture. Pas- 
tor, tell them that." She, because Christ was 
in her heart, arose superior to weakness, blind- 



The Blessed Life 257 

ness, death's approach, and was exultant. Chris- 
tianity is the largest conceivable life, and has 
within its bounds ''life, death, things present, and 
things to come," and ''we are Christ's, and Christ 
is God's/' Such is the blessed life, — one long 
way of service, comfort, fellowship with God, and 
deep delight. Who has it covets no man's lot, 
for he makes journey accompanied with the 
"powers of the world to come." His "citizen- 
ship is in heaven," and on earth he feels the 
thrill of the immortal fellowship. 

And the method of this Blessed Life, the hu- 
man method of making available the riches of 
gospel grace, is thought, reading, prayer, asso- 
ciation with the good, serving others, loving God 
and man. 

Christians are to think, "think on these 
things." We are saved by faith, and we walk 
by faith, but our faith is rational. God wants 
intelligence. He bids us follow, but this follow- 
ing is not blind. We know him we follow, and 
take no chances in such pursuit. Religion is not 
primarily ecstasy. Feeling is not the first fact 
of this new life. Feeling we shall have, ecstasy 

shall be ours; but these are results, not causes. 
17 



258 The Blessed Life 

''We believe, therefore have we spoken/' With 
reason we lay hold on God. Let no one think 
reason is at a discount in the gospel. We think 
God's thought, we ponder his doings, we watch 
the cross with what intentness of vision Mary, 
the mother, did. Feeling will flood the shores 
of the heart as tides the shores of continents 
when we have received, through reason and 
faith, into the heart the Christ of whom himself 
made query, "What think ye of Christ?" Give 
reason play in the blessed life, but recall that is 
only a beginning. Rest not there. Shame not 
the Christian precepts by supposing them a 
dialectic exercise. Religion is not barren intel- 
lectuality, but fertile spirituality. And read. 
''Give attention to reading." Read good things; 
any good book will gird your holy might, 
whether the book be history, biography, devo- 
tional literature, fiction, or poetry. Read noble 
thoughts, whoever wrote them. Authors are 
God's generous gifts to help us to the wider 
life. Use them, and therein justify God's good 
gift. The poets have so many of them seen 
God that they will teach you how to see him. 
Flee the delusion that you are never studying 



The Blessed Life 259 

God save when you are in church or reading 
the Bible. When you watch a sunrise you are 
watching one means of God's advent for the 
world. Who gathers flowers, and revels in them, 
is studying and enjoying God's thoughts. Read 
nature, read books; but do not neglect nor for- 
get the one Book. Lose all others, but hold the 
Bible fast. This is the lamp to the feet and the 
light to the path; this is the ''commandment 
which is exceeding broad;" this the Book which 
holds hearts up to the lip-ht, as if held against 
the sun. 

You will not know yourself till God's Book 
of soul-revelation reveals you to yourself, and 
surely you will not know Christ till his Book 
glows his glory on your heart. Fraternize with 
the Bible. Do not think its study a perfunctory 
task; do not read as matter of duty, but read 
as you would a letter from a father beloved. 
How we watch for letters from those we love! 
Have this feeling toward this Book. A love- 
letter ''from the Father of lights" is what it is, 
and a story very precious of a love "passing the 
love of woman." I have found everything in 
the Bible. No book sows my mind to thought 



26o The Blessed Life 

like this Book, and no words set my thoughts 
on fire as these words. If you love God, you 
will love his words, and the more you become 
familiar with them, the more will your heart 
turn of its own accord to those dear pages, as 
a child's feet turn home at night, not knowing 
that they are turning homeward. 

And trust. ''Have faith in God." Than these 
there are no weightier words for the Christ-in- 
clined life. ''Believe in God; believe also in 
me," are the companion advices of the Christian 
career. Trust grows by trust. As we believe, 
so we believe. Faith truly leads to faith. Ask 
any Christian well on in the holy life whether 
this be so^ and he will answer "yes." Do not 
nurse your doubts. Be fair with them. Give 
them a hearing, but do not give them all the 
hearing; for they will monopolize all the time. 
The tendency of doubt is to become garrulous. 
You will do well to guard this point. Let faith 
have opportunity for speech; it has a pleader's 
skill if once you listen. Life never grows by 
negations. Faith affirms, and affirmations are 
the food of strength. Doubt saps courage. 



The Blessed Life 261 

School faith; try God, lean on him, and see how 
sure his promises will prove. 

Good men and women are experts in prayer. 
Read, if you may, the lives of Augustine, Pay- 
son, Rutherford, Livingstone, Martyn, and such 
others as have been named in the catalogues of 
saintly spirits, and find how they lived in prayer. 
That was their respiration. God was their air, 
and prayer was their breath. They knew the 
way to God was prayer. They stormed the 
gates of heaven with prayers; they prayed and 
toiled together; they mixed prayer with what- 
soever else they did. Prayer is conquest. Study 
to be great in prayer — by which is meant be at 
home with God. Feel him yours, and so feel 
him easy and sure of access. Be in nothing 
bafifled. ''Thy will be done :" feel the temper of 
that phrase, and the temper of Him who ut- 
tered it. Read once and again that noblest 
hymn in the English language, Charles Wesley's 
"Wrestling Jacob," and you will find the inter- 
pretation put on conquering prayer by one who 
himself was a man of influence with God. 

Associate much with the good. Learn their 



262 The Blessed Life 

secret, and that their companionship is wine. 
Serve others, and forget you have a self to serve. 
Love God, and in loving him find you have be- 
come a fervent lover of mankind. 

This is the method of the Blessed Life. Use 
the method, and have the life, my soul, and thou 
shalt 

**0n eagle wings upborne to heaven ascend; 

Thou shalt behold his face, thou shalt his name adore, 
And praise the wonders of his grace for evermore." 



A SONG OF THE JOURNEY 

William A. Quayle. Scotch Melody. Arr. by Edith M. McCarty. 






j I am go-ing on my journey, glad with joy from dawn to dark, With the 
^* ( I am drinking at those fountains whence the living waters flow, 1 am 
D C. And 1 know not a - ny trou-ble ; for 1 have the tempest's King To 




spi-rit of the morning and the car-ol of the lark : ) 

j long my way I go. 



hearing heaven's music as a- [ojnit) - 
change my winter's fury to the [omit) . 



. gladness of His spring. 







^ 



f And my heart is full of laughter like the sing-ing of a psalm ; ) 
( My sky bends blue a - bove me with its wind of even-ing balm ; j" 



^^ 



m 



^f^ 



I have heard my Master calling, and His voice is music sweet; 

And He bids me march right forward, nor dream of a retreat. 

He says His Land of Beulah lies before me out of sight, 

Where reigns the deathless daylight never shadowed by the night. 

He bids me do my duty, though humble it may be. 

And do what thing lies nearest in glad humility ; 

For Christ is one that serveth, and thinks no service mean 

That helps the world's endeavors to help its heart be clean. 

So I walk highways and byways ; and my hands are rough with toil. 

As I try to make a garden out of hard, infertile soil ; 

But I see God's flowers a-growing where there grew no flowers before, 

And my life is full of gladness, and I work God's work the more. 

Bless God ! My lot is holy like a temple with its calm ; 

And I envy not an angel with his harp-song and his palm ; 

For I am God's own helper ; and He calls me by my name. 

And says my work is holy as a sacrificial flame. 

So I go along my journey, glad with joy from dawn to dark, 
With the spirit of the morning and the carol of the lark : 
For I drink at those bright fountains whence the living waters flow. 
And I hear heaven's gladsome music as along my way I go. 
And my heart is full of laughter, like the singing of a psalm ; 
My sky bends blue above me with its wind of evening balm; 
And I know not any trouble ; for I have the tempest's King 
To change my winter's fury to the gladness ot His spring. 



A PRAYER 

AND Thou who art the Blessed God art Author of the Blessed 
Life^ as is fitting. Our life is become as Thine, for are we not 
made partakers of the Divine nature i We glory in the cross — 
Thy cross. Its height sublime lifts like the majesty of God, only 
sweet with tenderness and shoreless compassion. We thank Thee 
humbly yet boldly for what Thou hast brought to us of strength 
and courage and balm and Diinistry and meaning to life, and 
swiftness of movement in all those things which make for the 
bettering of the world. We love Thy ways and Thy words. We 
love our brethren in the Christ. Their presence does us good as 
doth a medicine. We long for all the fullness of God. Lead us 
up and out. Bring us into close fraternity with whatsoever things 
are pure, honest , and of good report. 

Make our love for God increasingly apparent. May our religion 
be wholesomely human as well as graciously divine ! Lead us all 
along our way. Know the way we take, and we will trust Thee 
to guide MS aright, nor complain what circuit the journey makes. 

We love Thee, and would ask for grace to love Thee more ; for 
art not Thou, O Christ, the desire of all nations ? and to Thee shall 
all flesh come. 

Receive our praises and our love, for Jesus'* sake. Amen, 



CHAPTER XIV 
The Immortal Society 

'But tve Are come to an innumera.bte company of angels " 



SOME DAY 

" Some day," I say when my heart is aching, 

And life is a-tremble like wounded bird ; 
" Some day," I say when my heart is breaking 

With all the dull pain of hope deferred ; 

'* Some day," I say in my prayer of pleading, 

*< When clouds have all caught strange glow from the sun,- 
My heart shall stay all its wounds and bleeding. 
And all this lone waiting and hoping be done." 

*' Some day," I say; and my eyes forget weeping, 
And smiles kindle joy where tears lately stood ; 

** Some day," I say, <* I shall pass to God's keeping, 
And all the sad way of my journey seem good." 



PALPABLY the fleets of earth are scattered 
by the violent winds of death. We voyage 
together, and on a sudden the seas grow turbu- 
lent, and our ships part company and we sight 
them no more; and half wrecked, or wholly, we 
crash upon the shore in wreckage. Nay, nay; 
but find the shore a long line of peace, a haven 
where the scattered fleets at last are reunited. 
Such a shore is heaven. No sea's wild threnody 
of moaning can ever break behind this harbor- 
bar. 

Heaven is a fact. No myth is it; though if 
a myth, it is as beautiful as wings that bear a 
tired saint up to heaven and God. I love to 
think on heaven. I rest me dreaming on its 
holy fellowships, its eternal reign with Christ. 
Heaven is a society. I think it surely is a place, 
and I like the location of it; for heaven is where 
Jesus is, — 

"A place where falls not hail, nor rain, nor any snow, 
Nor ever wind blows rudely ; but it lies 
Deep meadowed, happy, fair with orchard lawns. 
And bowery hollows crowned with summer sea.'* 
267 



268 The Blessed Life 

The Christian differs from all others in that 
he owns to-morrow. He Hves a tireless life. 

There lies a knight upon the field of battle, 
dead. His casque is shattered, his helmet cleft 
in twain. His shield is dented with the mighty 
strokes of the mad onset. His spear is now 
broken, a fragment at his side. Materialistic 
thought declares the knight to be as much a 
fragment as his shivered spear; but the tran- 
scendent philosophy of immortality asks, What 
matters now a spear, a shield, since he who used 
to wield them has gone unto that tournament 
where spear and shield are needed nevermore? 
Man is immortal; he is a fountain that would 
fain spring up into eternal life. Here he is, a 
harp unstrung, which ofttimes makes strong dis- 
cord; but, restrung by the mighty Master's 
hand, across those chords shall sweep sympho- 
nies of imperishable beauty. He is a prince dis- 
guised, whose principality is broader than the 
limits of the world. He is : he knows not all he 
is to be. And yet he feels a prescience within 
him that time's weak bars shall vainly try to 
shut him in, but that, with pinions spread, he 



The Immortal Society 269 

shall leap with glad exultance back unto the 
heart of God. And thus, swallowed up in the 
Divine, the aeons of God's years shall pass by 
him with footsteps swifter than that of falling 
star, nor leave a single age-impress on his im- 
mortal forehead. 

Do we not see how this adds and must add 
to the value of time and character and love and 
friendship; how it does, like a sunset, flash glory 
on every spire and window-pane and woodland, 
and floods all the world with a bewildering 
glory? Only, our sunset fades! Nobody can 
love as a Christian can. Christian society runs 
out into the life to come as a promontory runs 
out from the coasts of earth, and stretches into 
the very climate of heaven. I knew an aged 
minister of the gospel who, for fifty-eight years 
or more, had, without interruption, preached the 
''blessed gospel of the blessed God.'' He was 
old, and his hair was very silvery. He had 
been valiant and gracious. He was a man of 
singular purity and manliness. To know him 
w^as to love him, and to know him longer was 
to love him more. He lay dying, and I sat be- 



270 The Blessed Life 

side his bed. His had been eloquent lips, but 
now his enunciation was indistinct. I leaned my 
ear close to his lips and listened intently. He 
talked on; his hands seemed to me to be knit- 
ting nervously together, but I did not under- 
stand him. His hands were, in truth, repeating 
the unspeakable poetry of his life. Finally, I 
caught his words, and they were these. He 
spoke brokenly, but was saying, ''Take — eat — 
this is — my — body — broken — for — you;'' and 
what I had thought was nervousness in the dy- 
ing man of God was his hands breaking and 
passing the bread of Hfe. Finally he said, ''I am — 
so — tired — I can not — dismiss — the people — 
I am — so tired." And his hands fell on the 
coverlid, and his lips ceased their babbling and 
were still. And in a little while he was sitting 
at the Lord's table in heaven. Does not Chris- 
tianity make a life like this truly an immortal life, 
and was not such a death a day of feasting and 
rejoicing? Christianity enhances everything. It 
emboldens thought, endurance, and love. It 
puts new stress — that is to say, immortal value — 
on things and men and moralities and devotions. 



The Immortal Society 271 

And Tennyson had half-light and more upon his 
heart when he wrote : 

"Sunset and evening star, 
And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea ; 

But such a tide as moving seems asleep, 

Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 

Turns again home. 

Twilight and evening bell, 

And after that the dark ! 
And may there be no sadness of farewell, 

When I embark ; 

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 

The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 

Wlien I have crossed the bar.'* 

For we are putting out to sea; a voyage and 
a haven! Enoch Arden, when he lay dying, on 
a sudden called, ''A sail! a sail!" and Enoch 
Arden was right. A sail, to bear him to his babe, 
a ringlet of whose hair he had worn upon his 
breast for many years, and thought to bear it 
to his grave; a sail, to carry him to where the 



272 The Blessed Life 

Christ, who had strengthened him and helped 
him in his heroic unselfishness, would meet him 
and welcome him; ''A sail! a sail!" to bear him 

** To where beyond these voices there is peace.' 

Heaven is a wide society. Be sure of that. 
We shall know and be known; for did not the 
three disciples know Moses and Elias talking 
with Jesus on the transfiguration mountain? 
And they had never seen them until that hour. 
Surely we shall know, and we shall know as we 
are known; and so the poet sings: 

** Knowing as I am known, 

How I shall love that word : 
And oft repeat before the throne 
Forever with the Lord." 

And Muhlenberg sings, in solemn and majestic 
music : 

** There saints of all ages in harmony meet, 
Their Savior and brethren transported to greet. 
While anthems of glory unceasingly roll, 
And the smile of the Lord is the feast of the soul." 

And we shall know them! Bunyan says, sight- 
ing the Delectable Mountains, and the more de- 
lectable company, ''Which when I had seen I 
wished myself among them." True; so must we 



The Immortal Society 273 

all; and in good time, please God, we shall. ''Im- 
mortality is brought to light through the gos- 
pel/' Christianity has immortal society. Thank 
God ! thank God ! And in that endearing poem 
of friendship, ''In Memoriam," Tennyson says: 

** There no shade can last 

In that deep dawn behind the tomb, 
But clear from marge to -marge shall bloom 
The eternal landscape of the past : 

A lifelong tract of time reveaPd ; 

The fruitful hours of still increase ; 

Days order' d in a wealthy peace, 
And those five years its richest field. 

O Love, thy province were not large, 
A bounded field, nor stretching far ; 
Look also. Love, a brooding star, 

A rosy warmth from marge to marge. 

That each, who seems a separate whole, 
Should move his rounds, and fusing all 
The skirts of self again, should fall 

Remerging in the general Soul, 

Is faith as vague as all unsweet : 

Eternal form shalt still divide 

The eternal soul from all beside ; 
And I shall know him when we meet : 

And we shall sit at endless feast. 
Enjoying each the other's good. 
What vaster dream can hit the mood 
Of Love on earth ?' * 
18 



274 The Blessed Life 

Society! ''We shall all be poets then," sings 
Mrs. Browning; and I quite believe her, for to 
talk of heaven turns all of us into poets and 
rhapsodists; and no wonder, for the thought 
of heaven thrills us like the touching hand of 
God. For in that country we shall have sight 
of Jesus, "whom, having not seen, ye love.'' And 
we are told that we shall see his face. That 
is society, and to that we come. And the apos- 
tle has told us a great, pathetic, yet triumphant 
saying, "We are come to an innumerable com- 
pany of angels." 

Surely there is society in heaven. All best 
things are there. All great servants are the sons 
of God; and they are there. Gurdon Robins 
sings : 

" There is a land mine eye hath seen 
In visions of enraptured thought, 
So bright, that all which spreads between 
Is with its radiant glories fraught ; 

A land upon whose blissful shore 

There rests no shadow, falls no stain ; 

There those who meet shall part no more. 
And those long parted meet again. 

Its skies are not like earthly skies. 

With varying hues of shade and light ; 



The Immortal Society 275 

It hath no need of suns to rise 
To dissipate the gloom of night. 

There sweeps no desolating wind 

Across that calm, serene abode ; 
The wanderer there a home may find 

Within the paradise of God.'^ 

Our life loosens its hold, and becomes tat- 
tered like a tattered tent, whose story Mrs. 
Miller tells: *> 

**0 soul of mine ! thine earthly home 

At best is but a tent, 
A moving habitation frail. 

Just for the journey lent : 
Sometimes in flowery meadows pitched, 

In Beulah's pleasant land, 
And sometimes on the mountain' s crest, 

Or on the desert's sand. 

O soul of mine ! the tempest oft 

Beats on the fabric frail ; 
The stakes are loosened, and the cords 

Strain widely in the gale ; 
The canvas yields — thro' many a rent 

Thou may' St the blue sky see ; 
A few more nights, and 'twill be pitched 

No more on earth for thee. 

O soul of mine ! has Jesus gone 
Thy mansion to prepare — 



2/6 The Blessed Life 

A home eternally to stand 
In matchless beauty there? 

Then may'st thou calmly watch the signs 

Of ruin and decay ; 
Soon the last cord will wear in two, 

Then Christ and heaven for aye !'' 

And here is a true heart's hope and hunger and 
prayer, in one of the sweetest lyrics that ever 
fell from Whittier's thought: 

'* When on my day of life the night is falling, 

And, in the winds from unsunned spaces blown, 
I hear far voices out of darkness calling 
My feet to paths unknown. 

Thou who hast made my home of life so pleasant, 
Leave not its tenant when its walls decay ; 

Love Divine, O Helper ever present. 
Be Thou my strength and stay ! 

Be near me when all else is from me drifting : 

Earth, sky, home' s pictures, days of shade and shine. 

And kindly faces to my own uplifting. 
The love which answers mine. 

1 have but Thee, my Father ! let Thy spirit 

Be with me then to comfort and uphold ; 
No gate of pearl, no branch of palm I merit, 
Nor street of shining gold. 



The Immortal Society 277 

Suffice it if — my good and ill unreckoned, 

And both forgiven through Thy abounding grace— 

I find myself by hands familiar beckoned 
Unto my fitting place. 

Some humble door among Thy many mansions, 
Some sheltering shade where sin and striving cease, 

And flows forever through heaven's green expansions 
The river of Thy peace. 

There, from the music all about me stealing, 
I fain would learn the new and holy song, 

And find at last, beneath Thy trees of healing. 
The life for which I long." 

Now, poems are necessary when one talks 
of heaven, because the poets, being seers of 
visions and dreamers of dreams, will say the 
greatest things in the noblest fashion, and see 
the noblest truths in their right relation. 

Poetry must have a voice when one speaks 
of heaven. How the hymn sings, saying : 

" No chilling winds or poisonous breath 
Can reach that healthful shore ; 
Sickness and sorrow, pain and death. 
Are felt and feared no more.'* 

And the gates of heaven shall not be shut. 
Hear the Scriptures say: ''And God shall wipe 
away all tears from their eyes; and there shall 



2/8 The Blessed Life 

be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, 
neither shall there be any more pain: for the 
former things are passed away. And he that sat 
upon the throne said, Behold, I make all things 
new. And he said unto me. Write: for these 
words are true and faithful." 

''And the city had no need of the sun, neither 
of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of 
God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light 
thereof. And the nations of them which are 
saved shall walk in the light of it: and the 
kings of the earth do bring their glory and honor 
into it/' 

"And he shewed me a pure river of water of 
life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne 
of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the 
street of it, and on either side of the river, was 
there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner 
of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month : and 
the leaves of the tree were for the healing of 
the nations. And there shall be no more curse : 
but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall 
be in it; and his servants shall serve him: and 
they shall see his face; and his name shall be in 



The Immortal Society 279 

their foreheads. And there shall be no night 
there; and they need no candle, neither light of 
the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: 
and they shall reign for ever and ever." 

I can hear Bishop Foster say yet, ''Even now 
I can hear its deep diapason, the ebb and flow 
of its deathless music." 

Yea, our Christ is there. ''And I saw no 
temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and 
the Lamb are the temple of it." 

We are told our citizenship is in heaven, and 
heaven is the heart's dear home. All good and 
joy and laughter and holy life are there; and I 
shall append, as postlude, these verses: 

No night is there ! 
Though night is here whose darkness fills 
The hollows of life's rugged hills, 

No night is there ! 

No night is there ! 
Here, shadows stand thick-ranked as men 
When bugle calls to war ; but then, 

No shadows there ! 

No night is there ! 
No dark hours filled with tears and pain 
As pools are filled with Autumn rain ; 

No night is there ! 



28 o The Blessed Life 

No night is there ! 
Along heaven's sky forever fair 
Floats deathless morning free from care, — 

No night is there ! 

No night is there ! 
Then heart, through sorrowing, grow strong ; 
These glooms are deep but last not long, — 

No night is there. 



A PRAYER 

THOU who livest and 7vast dead, we bless Thee. We helin^e 
Thou art the Resurrection and the Life, and that, gone from among 
us these many, many years. Thou hast been making ready a place 
for us, so that 7vhe7t we came all things viight be in good readiness 
and in waiting like a inansion for its expected lord long absent on 
a dangerous journey. Thou knowest my naine long since, and hast 
never forgotten it; even Thy hands are writ with it. Thou art 
making ready for me. This is too good for truth, yet also too good 
not to be all truth. Thou hast promised, and Thou keepest faith 
with the puniest of Thy children; wherefore I take great, sure 
encouragement. Heaven is my home. I am tried betimes and 
almost spent with the stress of battle and of climbing the rugged 
way; but Ihou dost promise a rest for the people of God, among 
which I humbly hope God may have counted me. The souV s ever- 
lasting rest I Hotu high the word and topless! I shall meet Thee 
on a morning, and my mother, 

^^ Loved long since and lost awhile.^* 

How sweet the meeting f L shall be faint with the long march, and 
with blood spilt in the long war ; but one look on Thee {for we 
shall see Him as He is) will refresh me more than a plunge in the 
fountain of life. 

Lf L have broken faith with Thee, my Lord, forgive me, Lf I 
have been coward when the fight was on, forget that in Thy cour- 
tesy of love. Lf L have shamed Thee by my dim perceptions of Thy- 
self and Thy service, as L have, forget this also. Thou knowest 
that L love Thee. Be near me while L stay yet a little longer where 
clouds gather and the tempests storm. Be near me when L grope in 
the valley of the shadow of death ; sow it with glory. Meet me 07i 
the threshold of the land which is veiy far off. Let me walk into 
heaven with Thee, and let me keep Thee before my eyes while eter- 
nity sings its endless psalm, and there L will love Thee and worship 
for ever and ever. Amen* 



JUN 10 1901 



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